#where's the love for MY washed-up depressed middle aged cat boy??? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dinosaurtsukki · 3 years

Text

haikyuu!! characters as people you meet at a college party

more university au’s because god i miss parties but not that i party hard i just drink and cry

***********************************************

Hinata: he brought sparkling wine with him and is now drinking it all by himself straight out of the bottle

Kageyama: vomited after drinking blueberry soju and is now washing himself and his clothes in the bathtub under hot water

Tsukishima: he has been nursing the same beer in the corner of the house with his headphones blaring ‘mad world’ for the past three hours

Yamaguchi: has been standing outside the door for the past hour muttering ‘go in. just go in. go in !! you’ll be fine! just go in!’

Ennoshita: he’s been tapping his passed-out friend on the shoulder and yelling ‘hey, hey, are you okay?’ for quite a while. also he’s been wearing his stethoscope backwards

Tanaka: the friend who’s passed out cold after just drinking one beer and also has his shirt off

Nishinoya: he’s swinging from the chandelier even though he has absolutely no idea how he got there or how to get down from there. you can say he’s hanging out

Daichi: the one manning the grill but he has absolutely no idea just how many burgers and hotdogs he’s cooked, only that he’s been sweating so much that his glands can no longer produce sweat

Sugawara: the social butterfly of the party, always asks people how they’re doing and if they want more food. he drinks from a fancy flask that’s actually full of vinegar

Asahi: he just keeps going back and forth from the convenience store buying water for everyone because there’s no drinking water in the entire fucking house

Oikawa: at one point, he just drunkenly yelled ‘OH MY GOD THIS IS JUST LIKE RIVERDALE’ and was boo-ed and kicked out of the house

Iwaizumi: the one who started boo-ing oikawa out of the house, also decided to hang out in the treehouse in the backyard because that’s what troy and gabriella did in High School Musical 3: Senior Year

Matsukawa: passed out on the lawn with a bucket in his hands. whenever he wakes up, he sits up and vomits everywhere except for where the bucket is

Hanamaki: the one chilling, fully dressed, on a flamingo pool floatie in the middle of the pool with a Sex on the Beach in his hand

Kyoutani: the one who snuck up to the master bedroom of the house and rifled through a woman’s make-up drawer and used her eyeliner before going back downstairs

Yahaba: has been secretly taking a video of iwaizumi singing ‘right here, right now’ in the treehouse

Ushijima: he’s there sitting on the couch, in the midst of all the chaos, writing a paper on his laptop as if he was working in the library (he’s not even wearing earphones)

Shirabu: he comes in the earliest and gets as drunk as possible before leaving at exactly 11 pm on the Uber he called beforehand (med students don’t get a break sorry)

Tendou: his entire left arm is covered with lime juice and has been dipped in salt. he just stands around the group of people taking shots and offers his arm

Semi: lying on the rooftop with his headphones on and staring at the stars, pretending he’s the edgy, misunderstood young man in a coming-of-age film

Goshiki: an expert at doing the keg stand but he actually hates alcohol and is super lightweight. he just does it for the attention and like a praise

Kuroo: goes absolutely BATSHIT CRAZY when the DJ plays ‘mr. brightside’ like a white boy. also he’s ranting at a complete stranger about the Sharknado series

Kenma: he’s huddled in the corner drinking Dr. Pepper and playing on his game console. it’s not because he’s antisocial, he’s sulking because the cat he was trying to pet ran away from him

Lev: he has a tendency of just,, falling,,on the floor,, whenever he’s drunk. at some point, you heard someone yelling ‘TIMBER’ and then the sound of lev falling

Yaku: the best person to come to for mixed drinks. he’s basically the bartender for the entire party. he secretly stands on a box behind the counter though

Bokuto: the one who hogs the karaoke machine and keeps singing either backstreet boys songs or britney spears. at one point he tried to do a rap song but failed and was depressed

Akaashi: the ever-amazing DJ who just knows what the perfect song to play is. he’s super protective about his job though and chases away anyone who wants him to play ‘all-star’ on loop

Atsumu: the one who decided it was a good idea to jump from the roof and into the pool before later climbing out and going back to the party soaking wet

Osamu: mixes the weirdest drinks and makes people drink them like chocolate milk and tequila mixed with lemon syrup. he also poured fricking pickle juice in the jungle juice

Suna: passed out in the middle of the living room and is basically turned into a whiteboard with everyone writing random shit on him (someone even did their math homework on his back)

Kita: the one that the sad drunk people go to and cry on. kita will just be patting their head, telling them that it’s all okay and he’s here for them, before giving them a bottle of water

Sakusa: he is basically ANYWHERE except for where people are vomiting (like bathroom or the lawn). he was going to chill by the pool when atsumu jumped in

***********************************************

taglist (still open to anyone who wants in!): @montys-chaos @miyumtwins @strawberriimilkshake @pocubo @sugawara-sweetheart @akaashisbabydoll @laure-chan@therainroguefanfiction @atetiffdoesart @stephdaninja @oikaw-ugh@charliefredb @dramaqueenweeb1469 @tremblinghearts@applepienation @doodleniella @haikyuu-my-love

360 notes · View notes

aliendes · 4 years

Text

Natural Borns - Chapter One

dystopian!au / futuristic!au

AUTHOR NOTE: here it is! Chapter one of Natural Borns. If you haven’t already, please read the prologue, or else this wont make the most sense. The prologue gives some backstory about the universe that you need to fully enjoy the story. Thank you for all the love on the prologue, it pushed me to want to put this out early. If you enjoy this series, please follow and reblog so it can reach more eyes. Feel free to send me an ask! I would love to answer any questions, because I’m sure I’m inevitably going to leave some things unanswered (this is my first time writing a series, after all). Enjoy! xx Des

Series info/genre: Angst, fluff, (possible) smut NSFW due to darker themes Pairings: ot7 x fem reader (eventual) Warnings: this series will have different trigger warnings listed for each chapter (if there are any), but as a whole, this series will include violence, mentions of depression & other mental illnesses, cursing, abuse, drugs/alcohol, some shitty medical descriptions because i am NOT a doctor, self-esteem issues, fluff, and possible smut in future chapters (but that’s undecided). i will add more warnings/tags in the future if there are any. Description: In the year 2613, over half of the world’s population are what scientists consider ‘designer babies’. YN is a small town girl who is a true natural born, someone born naturally without he help of a lab or gene splicing. Her DNA is greatly sought after, but what is she willing to do to protect it? Word count: 3.6k

It was early. Too early for you to be awake. As you rolled over in your bed, taking your poofy duvet cover with you, you noticed that it was barely dawn. Your curtains were drawn, how you always left them - liking to wake up with the sun, and you couldn’t even see said sun on the horizon yet. You could make out a pink line that melted perfectly with the purple and blues of the night sky. After admiring the beauty of it for a moment, you rolled back over with a huff.

You’re already awake, might as well get out of bed.

You lived on a peach farm, or orchard, that your family owned and had chores and duties to fulfill around the house and land. The orchard was on about ten acres, small for a farm, but big enough to get the job done. Your father sells the peaches you harvest to local grocers and restaurants and sells the rest at your mother’s stall at the farmer’s market in town. Your mom grows flowers in her garden on the property and makes beautiful arrangements for locals. She just recently made the arrangements for the wedding of one of your old classmates. You helped out where you could with harvests, taking care of the animals your family cared for, and working the market on weekends. It wasn’t a luxurious life by any means, but you were happy. You definitely couldn’t complain, not when most natural borns had way less than you. You were fortunate, really, and content living this small town life.

You swung your legs over the edge of your bed and stretched your arms up high, letting out a big yawn. Your pajamas were all bunched up and uncomfortable on your legs as you scooted closer to the edge of your bed, expecting your toes to meet the cool wood of the floor. Instead, you were met with something warm and fuzzy and a loud meow that sounded through your room, making you jump.

“Ai- sorry Mochi,” you grumbled, watching the cat scurry across the floor. You smiled and shook your head at the cat, who was now giving you a death glare from next to your bedroom door. You slowly stood up, rubbing the sleep from your eyes and opened the door to let the devil cat out. He quickly took advantage of the open door and ran down the stairs as fast as he could. You watched him for a moment before making your way to your bathroom down the hall.

Closing and locking the door behind you, you started your morning routine of brushing your teeth and hair and washing your face. Once you turned the faucet off, you rubbed a clean white towel over your face, pulling it down slowly as you peeked over it at the mirror. You looked tired, small bags beginning to form under your eyes, skin darkening slightly from being out in the sun, maybe even a little sunburnt from working at the market yesterday. Still starting at your reflection, you hang your towel up on the rack with a sigh, turning to get dressed for the day.

Your normal work day attire consists of jeans and a t-shirt. It was June, just starting to get unbearably hot in Korea, so you opted for some looser linen pants and a light shirt. You didn’t have a whole lot to do today other than feed animals, clean the chicken coop, and help mom out with some arrangements. You wouldn’t be harvesting the peach trees until late July or early August at the rate they were growing currently, though you did still need to monitor them and make sure they remained healthy before harvest season.

By the time you were ready for the day, the sun was just barely coming up and the smell of coffee beans entered your nose. Mom must be up, you thought to yourself. You smiled and made your way down the stairs, grabbing onto the bottom of the banister and swinging yourself around it, an old habit of yours from all the way back in elementary school. You were still a kid at heart, even at the age of 23.

“Good morning Pearl!” your mother called from the kitchen. Pearl was the nickname your parents have called you since you could walk. Natural pearls are extremely rare, almost never occurring in nature. You were also a rare breed, a true natural born, hard to find like a pearl, hence the nickname.

“Morning mama,” you said, walking up to her and giving her a side hug, “watcha makin’?” You asked with a teasing lilt to your voice. Your mom was a tad shorter than you and you liked to take advantage of that, leaning your elbow on her shoulder as you watched her stir the pan in front of her.

“Steamed eggs and rice, now go get your father, would you? We have to start on these arrangements soon, Mrs. Lee needs 25 of them by tomorrow afternoon.”

You gave your mom a nod and made your way back up the stairs, hopping over Mochi who was now taking up residence on the second step. “You’re gonna get stepped on your curious cat,” you said under your breath. Mochi just watched on as you took two stairs at a time.

Before you could reach the top of the stairs, you nearly stumbled straight into your father who had just come around the corner. “Who-whoa,” he laughed out as you grabbed onto the railing to stop yourself from smacking into him.

“Mom needs you!” You yelped out, passing your dad on the stairs and running into your room to grab your phone from your nightstand. You could hear your dad chuckling as he walked down the stairs. As you picked up your phone, you noticed you had a new message in your group chat you had with your two best friends, well, your only friends, you supposed.

From Mina [11:13 pm]: pearl!!!

From Mina [11:13 pm]: pearl are u awake?

From Woo [11:15 pm]: why are you awake min?

From Mina [11:17 pm]: cant sleep, pearl, u up!?

From Woo [11:23 pm]: I’m gonna guess not

From Mina [11:25 pm]: ugh dfghjk

You giggled at your screen for a moment before typing back a response.

You [6:37 am]: sorry guys, i went to bed early last night what’s up min?

You pocketed your phone, definitely not expecting a response at this ungodly hour, and headed back downstairs. On your short walk, you thought to your two friends, Mina and Wooyoung, who you befriended in middle school. Well, actually Mina befriended you and Wooyoung in seventh grade because you were both outcasts that didn’t talk to anyone. Ever the martyr, she brought your little group together and you’ve been thick as thieves ever since. You don’t see them as much as you’d like nowadays, as they both attended the small community college in your town. You never really liked school, never excelled at anything, and were always a homebody. College just didn’t sound fun to you, especially if people there were anything like at your highschool. Highschool hadn’t been kind to you. You were labeled ‘half-breed’ and ‘mutant’ by a group of girls who wanted nothing more than to see you suffer because of your looks. Boys would flirt with you, leave you love notes, and even try to harass you in the halls, but never because they actually took an interest in you. The one time you went to a party with Mina, you had been cornered in some guy's barn by one of the popular boys who was trying to get in your pants. This just made the popular girls even more angry with you and would jump through hoops to make your life hell while at school. All of those experiences taught you one thing: most people can’t be trusted. Some might say you have trust issues (Mina) while others will try to get you to come out of your shell a bit more (Woo and your mom), but in the end, you’re comfortable with your two best friends and your parents. You never asked for more because you simply didn’t need it.

Most, if not all, families these days only had one child, so you nor your friends ever knew what it was like to have siblings. Even your parents were only children, so no aunts, uncles, or cousins to call an extended family. This was normal, though, because a law was put in place in 2505 banning families from having more than one child to help with population control. If a family broke this law, they were fined excessive amounts of money. The law was easy to enforce with parents of lab born children, since their child had to be entered into a national database, meaning no company would work with them again to avoid hefty fines, or possibly being put out of business. It was a little harder to enforce with natural born families. The law was definitely one sided, aimed to force more and more natural borns into poverty.

You were snapped out of your daydream as you entered your kitchen, taking in the sight of your dad sitting at the dining table reading something on his tablet and your mom making a grocery list. You smiled softly, rounding the table and taking your usual seat next to your mother. “Thanks for breakfast, mom,” you said kindly, leaning over to give her a kiss on the cheek.

“Of course, Pearl. Now eat up, we need to get going soon if-” your mother was cut off by the sudden shriek of the doorbell, which caused you to jump what had to be 5 feet in the air. Who was ringing your doorbell at - you took your phone out - 6:44 in the morning?

Your father had the same perplexed look that you must’ve worn, getting up out of his chair and heading towards the front room of the house. You shared a puzzled look with your mom who just shrugged her shoulders and went back to her list, blowing on a piece of hot egg in her spoon.

As you started to fiddle with your own spoon, you tried to strain to hear the conversation happening in the other room. You could hear hushed murmurs that sounded rushed, almost angry. You squint your eyes in confusion. It sounded like your dad was mad. He never gets mad. Who could be at the front door? Slowly, you rise from your seat to go investigate, your mother paying you no mind.

As you round the corner of the kitchen, your father comes into view holding the front door at a 90 degree angle from the wall, effectively blocking your vision of the man on the other side. Your dad’s profile told you what you needed to know, though. He was visibly angry, apples of his cheeks reddening. He was still speaking in a hushed tone, though you could tell it was tense.

Slowly, you walked over to your father, peeking around the front door. If your dad noticed your presence, he didn’t mention it. Standing on your front porch was a man, shorter than your father, with dark hair and round glasses perched on his nose. He was obviously a natural born, as he didn’t have any of the perfect or striking features you were used to seeing on business men such as himself. He didn’t look intimidating in the least, but you could almost see the steam rolling out of your dad’s ears. As soon as the man caught sight of you, a bright grin took over his face.

“Ah, you must be YN,” he starts, taking a step forward and reaching out his hand, “it’s so nice to finally meet you.”

You were confused by his words, taking a step back to match his. You didn’t know this man and you definitely didn’t want to shake his hand. Did he say finally meet you? What is that supposed to mean?

“You need to leave,” your father started, causing the shorter man’s attention to fall back on him, “now.” Your dad left no room for discussion, effectively ending the conversation.

The mysterious man nodded once, looking back at you. “We’ll be in touch,” were his final words before turning on his heel and walking back towards a sleek, black car at the end of your drive. Before you could take in any more details of the car, your father was closing the front door. He breathed out a heavy sigh and placed a hand on your bicep, gently leading you back to the kitchen.

Your mom looked up from her, now nearly finished, breakfast. “Who was it, sweetie?”

Your dad sat back in his chair, leaving you standing, confused, in the middle of your kitchen. “Yeah, dad. Who was that?” You asked, genuinely concerned about the stranger.

Your dad let out another sigh before turning to look up at you, “Just another company. You know how they are, Pearl. Persistent, but they’ll back off eventually once they realize we aren’t interested.”

You slowly nodded in understanding. These designer baby companies have been coming to ‘scout’ you since you were in elementary school. They would come to your home, or even your school, and try to talk to you about selling your DNA and how it would be beneficial to your family, maybe even bring them out of poverty, make them rich. When you were a child, the offer was enticing, and you’d be lying if you said you weren’t a little curious even now. But you knew where you stood on the subject. You didn’t want to sell your DNA. You didn’t want anything to do with these big companies that were making natural borns poor while getting rich in the process. But you remembered something, “Dad, what did he mean by finally meeting me?”

Your dad has his back turned to you again, starting to eat his breakfast. You could see him visibly stiffen at your question before quickly relaxing again. Your mother seemed to notice this too, sending a worried glance at him, to which you couldn’t see his response. Without turning to look at you, he mumbled, “That was Hyunwoo, a former classmate of mine.”

So you were right in your assumption about Hyunwoo being a natural born. You know your dad hadn’t gone to college, and his family lived in this very house while he was growing up. That means Hyunwoo must be from the same town as you. Most people living here were living in poverty, so why did he look like a million bucks? No one from this town could afford a car like that either. Before you could get too lost in your thoughts, your father was speaking again, “He works for a pretty well known company in Seoul. He’s been interested in you since you were a little kid.” The thought alone was enough to make you feel nauseous. You didn’t even know this man, yet he’s known about you practically all your life. Apparently he’s been seeking you out for a while too, if your assumptions are correct.

“Why was he here?” You voiced your thoughts aloud.

Your father set his spoon down on his dish before turning his entire body in his chair to face you. “It’s nothing Pearl,” he started, firm but gentle, “You know these companies never leave us alone. His is no different. They’ll get the message sooner or later.” There was a finality in his tone, making it known there was no room for discussion on the matter. With a nod of his head he stood up from his seat, gathering his dishes, and deposited them into the sink. “I’ll be out in the orchards if you need me.”

You nodded before sitting down at the table and picking at your food.

“Don’t worry, dear,” your mother said as she, too, stood up with her dishes, “this type of thing happens all the time.”

Even though you trusted your parents, and they were right - it did happen fairly often, something about Hyunwoo seemed different. The way he looked at you and spoke the words ‘finally meet you’, made the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Even your mom and dad seemed nervous when his name was spoken at the kitchen table. But you trusted your parents. Right?

In the early afternoon, you had just finished your chores of feeding the chickens and cats, and you were wandering around the orchard. Your dad had retired to the shed on the far north corner of the property. He liked to spend a lot of time in there, tinkering with old appliances. You and your mother had finished the arrangements for Mrs. Lee earlier and now she was at the market fulfilling the list she made earlier.

You didn’t really have anything that needed to get done right away. You know you should probably go check on the flowers in your mom’s garden, make sure they don’t need to be watered again, but it’s been a while since you’ve walked through the orchard without the responsibility of the trees looming over you. Your father cleaned up the trees earlier, made sure drip lines were intact and checked over the farm, so you decided to indulge in your favorite pass time.

You walked away from the chicken coop towards the edge of the orchard. It was truly one of your favorite places in the whole world - not that you’ve seen much of it, but still - and you could spend hours getting lost among the beautifully colored canopy of peach blossoms.

When you reached the edge of the orchard, you leaned your hand against the cool oak colored bark of one of the trees, and toed off your shoes, leaving them in the dirt. The trees were just starting to blossom with pretty pink and white flowers among the green and almost yellowish leaves. Only about another month before harvest, you thought idly to yourself.

As you walked through the trees, you relished in the feeling of the cool dirt beneath your feet, squishing between your toes with each step. The air outside was hot and humid, but the earth was cool under the shade of the trees. With each trunk you passed, you let your hand ghost over the rough bark, memorizing the feeling of it. You looked up at the leaves, slowly moving in the slight breeze today. Your family's farm was small, only about 10 acres, so the trees weren’t so dense you couldn’t see the sky above or would be completely hidden from view while walking through them. If your dad were to come out of his shed, you probably would’ve been able to see him from here, though it was a good distance away.

As you got closer to the center of the trees you found a nice trunk to sit down against and pulled your phone from your pocket, checking your group chat with your friends.

From Mina [2:05 pm]: pearl pearl pearl

From Mina [2:06 pm]: where are u

You rolled your eyes at your best friend's antics before typing out your reply.

From you [2:36 pm]: walking through the trees, what’s up?

Almost immediately you were looking at a response.

From Mina [2:37 pm]: there was some guy here on campus today

From Mina [2:38 pm]: a girl from my econ class said he was looking for you

From Mina [2:39 pm]: said he looked like he didn’t belong here, i’m assuming it’s some company but i wanted to let u know

Your heart dropped into your stomach at this new knowledge. It wasn’t incredibly strange for someone to be looking for you at the college. Most residents of the town attended the college at some point or another, what with it being free to attend because of a bill passed decades ago by natural born activists fighting for education for those living in poverty. But something about this felt wrong.

Before you could respond to Mina to ease the worries you were sure she felt, you heard what sounded like a twig snapping somewhere behind you. Already on edge from the text messages, you quickly stood up, turning almost completely around in your spot. Your eyes focused on the spot where you thought you heard the noise come from, only to be met with nothing. Despite knowing you heard something, part of you wondered if it was all in your head, the events of the day messing with you.

In the distance, you could see that your family’s truck was still missing from the drive, meaning your mom was still out shopping. Quickly, you glanced at your father’s shed - the doors were still shut tightly. Momentarily you wondered if he would be able to hear you if you screamed. Shaking the thought from your mind, you turned back around to face the tree. Out of the corner of your eye, you caught movement from behind a trunk a few yards in front of where you stood.

“Who’s there?!” you half yelled, fear starting to creep up your spine. You definitely weren’t one to fight, much more comfortable running from your problems and confrontation. You wished Mina was here, she would be brave enough to move forward, to protect herself from danger. You slowly started walking backwards, not taking your eyes off the trunk where you believed someone to be hiding. You wanted to turn and run, but didn’t want to risk whoever it was behind that tree attacking you from the back. As you continued to take cautious steps, your back collided with something firm, yet not hard enough to be a tree trunk. This was softer, warmer. Human.

To be continued....

AUTHOR NOTE: Sooooo, who do you think YN ran into?! Who do you think will make an appearance next chapter? ;)

202 notes · View notes

ibtk · 3 years

Text

Book Review: THE SEVENTH MANSION by Maryse Meijer

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review though Edelweiss. Trigger warning for sexual assault, homophobia, violence against animals, and disturbing sexual content.)

-- 4.5 stars --

There is this person I love. And he’s not even a person.

After Xie's parents split and an environmental disaster sends his already precarious mental health spiraling, Xie and his father Erik relocate from California to an unnamed town in the rural south, in search of the proverbial fresh start.

At first, Xie is your garden-variety teenage outcast: melancholy. goth. vegan. an outsider. friendless. forgettable. Yet he's quickly "adopted" by the only other vegans in the school - girlfriends Jo and Leni, who together make up the entirety of FKK.

The group's animal rights activism slowly evolves from leafleting to direct action: the trio breaks into a local mink farm, freeing as many of its captives as they can. Xie is nabbed during the getaway, and suddenly he goes from "nobody" to "that freak who vandalized the Moore farm". Instead of silence and indifference, Xie is met by hostile sneers, gossip, and relentless bullying. He takes a leave of absence from high school, instead getting one-on-one tutoring at the local library. His parents are forced to pay restitution, and Xie's placed on probation.

Xie's only respite is nature: his burgeoning vegetable garden; the small but pristine forest behind his house; and, eventually, the mysterious light, nestled among the branches, that leads him to a tiny church - and his beloved. St. Pancratius, who was martyred in 304 A.D. and whose remains are on covert display in a one-room church in the middle of nowhere.

He traces the image with his finger. The story the same in every version: A boy on a road, refusing to lift his sword against the lamb, losing his head every time the story is told, again and again and again.

Still, all of this comes with a cost: loving nature, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, means saying goodbye to it one day. Relationships can be messy, even when they're with clean bones. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in our own shit that we're oblivious to what our loved ones are going through. Maybe your tutor shows up to work one day piss drunk and tells you about her abortion. Or your friends drag you to a backwoods meeting of environmental activists, where one of them sexually assaults you. Or you show up to a mass protest that is even more massive than you anticipated, and find you're unable to protect yourself, let alone the 55 billion+ land animals slaughtered for food every year in the US alone (animalclock.org).

The problem is too big, even when it's one of the smaller ones. The problem is impossible.

While disturbing, Xie's theft of a skeleton is not the worst crime he'll commit in his teen years. As FKK becomes involved with a local animal rights group, and Xie's sanctuary is threatened, he careens toward an inevitable (????) collision with the outside world, which neither understands him - nor cares to. (Fuck capitalism.)

THE SEVENTH MANSION is one weird-ass book; I mean, the main character has sex with a skeleton (!). This is certainly the wildest aspect of the story, but it's not alone. For example, take the narrative structure, which has a kind of stream-of-(Xie's)-consciousness vibe. Many of the sentences are fractured, even forced, as though we're pulling them from the depth's of Xie's tortured soul. His thoughts. Are broken. Up. Like this. Conversely, there are no chapters, and so many of the paragraphs are just huge, unbroken blocks of text - almost as though Meijer is framing Xie in opposition to the larger world around him.*

I suspect that THE SEVENTH MANSION is one of those love it or hate it dealios. Personally, I loved it, even as some parts proved excruciatingly unbearable to read.

I don't know whether Meijer is vegan, but she gets so much right; sometimes it felt like she was rooting around inside my head. I went vegetarian my freshman year of college (1996, not to date myself) and vegan about 9 years later. Reading Xie was like having a mirror held up to my own depressive, anxious, vegan psyche. One thing carnists probably don't realize about walking around this world as a vegan is: it takes a ton of mental work, of suppression and dissociation, just to get through the day.

Animal suffering is omnipresent, and largely accepted. From Carl's Jr. commercials to classroom trips to the zoo; leather car seats to team lunches at non-vegan restaurants, where you'll be forced to watch your coworkers and friends devour the corpse of a once-living creature - someone's mother, brother, or child - we are constantly forced to bear witness to the oppression of animals. Worse, to pretend as though it's of no consequence: just to get along, or because doing otherwise would quickly devour your time, your prospects, your relationships. To say that it's depressing is an understatement.

Whether Xie is living through the oil spill that finally made his world "snap," or gazing into the eyes of caged mink, I was right there with him, trying not to cry. Not to break. There's so much suffering in the world; if you try to take it all in, to truly understand its scope, it will swallow you whole.

Speaking of the oil spill, which was the impetus for Xie to go vegan - Meijer's description of this moment in Xie's life brought back so many memories. When I decided to stop eating meat, I was working at a local grocery store. Every now and again, they had an employee appreciation dinner (in lieu of a raise, natch), which basically consisted of all you can eat burgers and hot dogs in the break room. Everyone would stuff their faces, taking in as many free calories as possible. Not because they were hungry, but to get as much of a leg up on our cheap ass employer as possible. The sheer gluttony and waste of it all is what finally did it for me. No one needed to eat seven hamburgers in one night; we did because we could, because not doing so would be to lose out. The working class eating the chattel, and no one eating the rich.

Point being, that's a singular moment in my life that I'll never forget. It stands out in stark relief, right alongside the deaths of my husband and furkids (six dogs and one cat down and counting). If I close my eyes, I can almost transport myself back there, white starched shirt, demo table, 7PM Friday fatigue, and all.

The last time he ate meat he was twelve years old, after the spill: Xie was Alex then. Even miles from the beach, they could smell something off; at first they thought it was the sandwiches, ham pressed hot in the pockets of Erik’s windbreaker, but the closer they got to the beach the stronger the smell became, noxious, chemical. They parked at their usual spot, yellow tape blocking access to the beach beyond. A black ribbon flat against the horizon; that was the water. No trace of blue. On the rocks below the lot a half dozen pelicans huddled together. Coated from beak to foot in oil. Don’t touch them, his father said. Someone will come wash it off. But there was no one. The black sea lapping the sand. Those bewildered eyes. He watched as one of the birds collapsed, its head twisted sideways against its folded neck. His father pulled him away. The fire on the water burned for two weeks; the beach remained black for a year. Sea turtles, dolphins, whales, gulls, crabs, otters, fish, birds rolled up by the waves in the tens of thousands. Oil on meat on sand. No stopping it. Xie got headaches, bloody noses; he was always tired, couldn’t sleep. His mother standing in the doorway, Stop playing games, you’re fine. But his father was never angry. Scared of what he saw. Xie in the dark. Unable to make it from one room to another. The people who used to go to the beach just went somewhere else. Life as usual. Slumped in the backseat as his father fed gas into the truck he suddenly couldn’t stand it. Stopped standing it. He opened the back door, started walking. Alex, his father called, but he was not Alex anymore. He poured out all the milk in the house and fed the meat to the dogs next door and rode his bike everywhere.

So yeah, our circumstances may be different, but Xie's conversion sure hit me in the feels.

Meijer also does an excellent job capturing the heartbreak and urgency of Millennials and Gen Z. As tormented as I might have been in high school, at least I had the luxury of not thinking too much about climate change - at least until Al Gore came along. Xie and his peers, on the other hand, will bear the brunt of their predecessors' unchecked greed. Nowhere is this divide more eloquently laid bare than in Jo's post-march argument with Erik (who is likely around my age):

Didn’t you see how he just folded up out there? He can’t protect himself, he won’t. You don’t know what he was like, before we came here, okay, you didn’t watch him, lying in bed day after day, ready to cut his goddamn throat because of all this shit, this constant litany of doomsday statistics, he just takes it in and he can’t—he doesn’t know what to do with it, and you want to keep shoving it in his face, when it’s—it’s enough! Staring at Jo, who stares back. Look, whatever you’re afraid of, whatever he’s afraid of, it’s already happening, okay? And he knows it, he’s living it, and he wants to do something about it. If there was some other option, some fantasyland where everything is going to be fine as long as we bury our heads in the sand, then believe me, I’d take it. But there’s not. Not for me and not for Leni and not for Xie and if you think you can protect him by denying that then you’re just—wrong. I’m sorry. She holds Erik’s gaze; he nods, the first to look away.

My gods, that scene just cuts me to the bone. As bleak as things are now, I cannot imagine going through all this - climate change, COVID-19, a Trump presidency, Democratic ineptitude/complicity, *gesturing wildly* - as an adolescent. Their elders cut them down before they even started crawling.

On a lighter note, Xie's scenes with his clueless mom and her equally clueless new husband (Jerry!) brought a(n admittedly wry) smile to my face. If I had a penny for every times this scene has played out in my life, I'd have enough cash monies to start my own animal sanctuary.

Don’t you want some vegetables, Xie? Jerry asks. I don’t eat animal products, Xie murmurs, and Jerry, confused, staring at the green beans, How is this— Butter, Xie interrupts. Butter is from milk, which is from cows, which are animals. Jerry blinks. Gosh, I didn’t even think of that. Sorry. Xie shrugs.

There's so much to obsess about here: I love Jo and Leni together, and their opposing circumstances just make the relationship so much more complex - and potentially fraught. Erik and tutor Karen (I wonder if the name choice was intentional?) are interesting supporting characters, and their relationships with Xie are so beautiful and nuanced; they both support him the best they know how.

Xie's interactions with his phantom lover are a little more confusing and difficult for me to comprehend. Perhaps P. represents Xie's inability to connect with the human world around him, or at least not as well as the more abstract, ephemeral natural world. Possibly P. is Xie's ideal human: one who would rather die than raise a finger against an animal (or one who cannot disappoint you by voicing their own opinions). Or maybe it's simpler than that, and Xie's hallucinations are just that: hallucinations. In any case, it made an already odd book absolutely bizarre, but in a good way, so I can't complain.

* This could just be because I was reading an early copy in need of further editing - but, seeing as how some formatting was already present, I think it was intentional. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3672191091

#books #book review #veganism #animal rights #Maryse Meijer #the seventh mansion #lgbtq #depression #anxiety #environment

3 notes · View notes

venusxxlangdon · 5 years

Text

Hotline Bling

summary: Nothing foretold troubles when suddenly Michael’s phone screen lit up with an incoming call. Without taking his eyes off the laptop, he reached for his phone, thinking it was Gallant.

“Hello?” he asked

“Have you been a good boy?”

AU, where Michael is an art student at Hawthorne University with a penchant for rollerball lip gloss & fleece blankets and the reader, is phone sex operator who accidentally calls the wrong number

pairing: sub!Hawthorne Michael x fem!reader

warnings: dirty talk, smut, sub!Michael, mommy kink, humping

words: 3.3k

A/N: there will be part 2!

Michael Langdon had been having a penchant for nice things for as long as he remembered himself. He was soft and delicate by nature, so it was no wonder that he enjoyed fleece blankets and scented candles, wide linen shirts to wear around the house instead of old T-shirts paired with sweatpants everyone liked, fluffy socks that made him feel comfy, warm bubble baths, and cinnamon French toasts topped with cherry jam or powdered sugar.

However, not everyone had the same opinion on his preferences. Constance Langdon, his grandmother (may she rest in peace), who raised him like he was her son, had been trying to do everything in her might to make Michael fit into her idea of what boys should have worn, studied in university, and done in their free time. Although, after he brought home his first high school girlfriend she seemed to stop being so hard on him as if the fact that Michael was into girls was some sort of a relief for her. The truth, as usual, was somewhere in the middle: Michael had no idea who he was into and preferred to go with a flow and take interest in whoever he liked no matter their gender, religion, and social background. He was not only a good-looking guy — the blond mop of short curls surrounded his head like a halo; crystal blue eyes, made him look like an angel; cherry kissed lips sometimes had a touch of a peachy lip gloss rollerball he carried in his designer backpack, resembled the petals of a beautiful rose — but he was also beautiful inside, despite a blinkered mindset of his grandmother.

When he moved to a small apartment that was only 20 minutes away from Hawthorne University where he was majoring in art, he started decorating the place to his liking: curtains made of sheer organza flowed down the windows like sea foam; the transparent fabric allowed the sunlight to spill into the room, bounce off the walls and flood every corner of it with radiant warmth.

The endless list of things he liked to do in his free time mostly consisted of going to the exhibitions and gallery openings, attending independent movie premieres with his artsy friends, grabbing a strong espresso on the way to class every morning, and dancing to his favorite songs while cooking. He lived alone and was comfortable with it because truly deep in his heart he was a loner. Of course, he had friends, take, for example, Gallant. A very extravagant guy he had met at one of the events and immediately clicked with. Michael did not know whether he believed in soulmates, but Gallant was definitely one of those people in his life who understood him and shared the same interests. However, Michael always enjoyed his time alone in the perfect world he built around himself and spent so much effort maintaining and protecting from people who thought that it was their duty to call it too “feminine”.

“Angel! I’m home!” he stepped into the apartment and tried to shut the door with his shoulder because both of his hands were busy holding a new print he’d got from Gallant and a paper bag from Whole Foods.

A white cat appeared around the corner to greet his owner who never managed to come home without a handful of stuff. He cautiously approached the print Michael put against the wall.

“How have you been, little guy?”

Michael found Angel a year ago on the way home when he was returning from a bar he went to with Gallant and his boyfriend. It was during the time when he was recovering from an extremely painful breakup with his last girlfriend. It was a complicated relationship from the very beginning, but he thought that his love would have been enough for both of them.

In the end, it left him drained out, heartbroken, and utterly devastated. So there he was young and depressed, cringing at the bitter aftertaste of alcohol, he drank with his friends, on his way to his small studio where nobody was waiting for him. At first, he didn’t understand where the tiny mewls were coming from, but as he approached one of the waste containers, he realized that among the litter there was a small white (well it was gray at that moment) kitten. Alone and abandoned just like him.

“I missed you, love” he smiled at the cat, picked up his bags and made his way to the kitchen.

It was a regular evening for him with a homemade dinner and some tv show in the background. He was sitting on the couch with the blanket around his shoulders and a Mac on his lap, working on a digital project for the upcoming assignment. Angel was snuggling by his side, snoring peacefully, and the light scent of his favorite 26 Santal Le Labo candle was filling the room. Nothing foretold troubles when suddenly his phone screen lit up with an incoming call. Without taking his eyes off the laptop, Michael reached for his phone, thinking it was Gallant.

“Hello?” he asked.

“Have you been a good boy?” the question asked in smooth silky voice on the other end made Michael jump on his seat. He immediately looked at the screen but did not recognize the number, so he hurried to bring the phone back to his ear and demand the explanation.

“Ex-excuse me?” he stuttered.

“I’m asking you if you’ve been a good boy for mommy today,” he felt the blush bloom across his cheeks not only from the lascivious tone of your voice but the words you were saying. What on God’s green earth was that?

It took him a few seconds to first, close his mouth because his jaw had dropped indeed, and second, formulate a coherent sentence.

“I’m sorry, I think you called the wrong number” he bit his lip and looked at the display once again as if the range of figures would have turned into something different.

“Is this strawberryboy69?”

Michael giggled at the nickname and put his laptop aside, straightening his legs out.

“No, my name is Michael, and who are you?”

You started scrolling through the data to check if you had called the right number feeling the embarrassment wash over you. Nervously you scanned the table of clients’ names, and your brows frowned when you found out that you had done everything correctly. Strawberryboy69 was supposed to be the same caller that was being on the line, and his kinks should have been “age play, mommy kink, slight humiliation, choking, and spanking”. There could not have been any mistake unless the client had told the wrong number himself.

“I’m sorry, sir. There’s gotta be a mistake,” you murmured still confused. “Please, accept my apologies, I-...”

And before you even finished the sentence Michael asked:

“Wait, was it supposed to be a sex call? Like for real?”

He didn’t know why he even asked that question, and why his cheeks were still beet red. Of course, the girl on the line was a phone sex operator. Who else would’ve started a conversation asking if he had been a good boy? He unconsciously ran his fingers through his hair and caught himself thinking that the idea of having actual phone sex really excited him. He’d never done anything like that, and it felt forbidden. Even mysterious, since he didn’t even know your name. He looked at Angel nervously as if the cat was judging him.

“Yes, and it seems like the client gave me the wrong number. I won’t be taking your time unless you’d like to try...” you lowered your voice to emphasize the last part of the sentence. Having worked for over a year in this company you had learned that if a caller started asking questions it mean that you got his attention. Even though this guy wasn’t the original strawberryboy69, you could try your luck and make him your new client.

Michael’s breath hitched.

“Um, I am really not sure” he mumbled, hugging the pillow and pressing it hard against his chest trying to calm down. “I’ve never tried anything like this....how much do you charge per minute?” he felt the thrill of the rush tightening in his stomach.

You smiled to yourself. You got him.

“It’s a dollar per minute, and after the 10th minute, the rate is 0.50$. Don’t worry about being inexperienced,” the tone of your voice switched from cool and professional to lustful and teasing in a matter of seconds, and that was what got Michael aroused. “I got you.”

Michael let out a frustrated sigh and flipped on his stomach, resting his chin on the pillow.

“Okay,” he cleared his throat, “okay, I think I want to try this, but what do I start with?”

You leaned back on your chair and put your phone on the speaker ready for the show.

“I want you to tell me about yourself first. What do you like in bed? What are your secret fantasies?” you turned on the timer.

There was some mumbling on the other end, and you heard something like “God, I can’t believe I’m doing it”.

After a long pause Michael spoke:

“It’s nothing extreme”, he said, “I think I am boring, like...okay, so...I don’t really.. Oh God.. Sorry, I can’t do this,” he felt so embarrassed; his cheeks were burning bright red.

It was a normal reaction for the person who had never practiced phone sex, and you understood him. So you took the initiative:

“Michael,” you remembered his name, “do you like being in control and dominating your partner?” you purred.

Michael shook his head as if you could see him.

“No, actually, it’s the opposite. I like when my partner takes care of me. I like it nice and soft,” he felt his cock harden in his pants and instinctively snaked his hand down his crotch to slightly squeeze it.

You briefly made a note “soft, probably sub” on a sticker, brought a pencil to your mouth, and pensively started sucking on the tip. It seemed like you got a new strawberry boy.

“Hmmm, sounds good” he was making a progress indeed, so you made sure to praise him for that, “I would love to take care of you, darling. Tell me what you look like, baby?”

Michael felt hot. Suddenly the temperature in the room increased drastically, and he slowly started unbuttoning his blue linen shirt. He traced the tips of his fingers starting from the prominent collarbones and moving inwards. Gently applying pressure, he whimpered at the sensation. Using a circular motion, he splayed his hand out gently across his chest and brought his fingers together at the pink nipple.

“I’m tall, and that’s why I’m always slouching. My grandma used to be so mad at me for not being able to sit straight, and-...” he paused suddenly realizing what he was saying. “God, I’m sorry, that was absolutely unsexy. I don’t know why I even said that...”

You couldn’t help yourself and giggled in response.

“It’s okay, darling” you hurried to reassure him, “feel free to share whatever you like. I’m listening.”

Michael buried his face in the pillow.

“Okay, okay,” he muttered, “I’m blond, curly-haired, and I have blue eyes, what else...”

You didn’t doubt that he was actually describing himself even though he could have pretended to be whoever he wanted. Most of your clients usually told you that they looked like models or actors, everyone was “tall, skinny, with big 11-inch dick (yes, sure), and pornographic boobs.” You couldn’t blame them for that because it was their fantasy and they had every right to dream about it.

“Baby, you are so pretty,” you told him, “let me lace my fingers through your curls and slightly tug on them so I could kiss that pretty neck of yours.”

Michael involuntary bucked his hips forward, grinding his clothed cock against the sofa.

“I-I-I love neck kisses,” he whispered feeling hot flush wash over him. “And love bites.”

You hummed approvingly. Slowly, step by step, you were going to bring him out from his comfort zone.

“That’s wonderful, kitten” you said twisting a strand of your hair around your finger, “imagine my full lips on your neck. Kissing and sucking on the tender skin. I’d slowly run the tip of my tongue across your throat and bite on your collarbones, mark you as mine. Are you mine, darling?”

You heard a quiet whimper on the other side. Michael’s hand passed the hem of his pants and sneaked inside to wrap around his half-hard cock. His mouth dropped open at the feeling of the velvet skin around the glistening head under his touch.

“Yes, I’d like to be yours.”

“That’s my good boy,” you cooed, “now I want to you touch yourself, baby,” it was like you were reading his mind, and Michael squeezed at the base of his shaft imagining that you were actually watching him.

“Already”, he said brokenly, moving his hand up and down his length smearing the precum.

“You are doing so well, love.” Having worked as a phone sex operator for quite a while, you stopped getting off with your clients, but this time it was different. Maybe it was Michael’s inexperience that got you, or his low, silky voice that sounded hot even when he was apologizing for the unnecessary things, or his appearance that he described. You imagined how nice it would be to have a blond, curly-haired boy on your lap, all flushed with embarrassment and arousal. You started circling your clit with the tips of your fingers through the denim fabric.

“Imagine sitting on my lap, baby,” you couldn’t hold yourself back and miss out on the opportunity to act out that fantasy of yours. “All desperate for me. Rutting your hips back and forth, as my hands cup your ass and squeeze it. Hard.”

Michael’s eyes fluttered open; he lifted his head from the pillow and threw it back at the thought of straddling your thighs, moaning loudly.

“Ugh, please” he whined, jerking himself off. The rough material of the sofa didn’t provide the friction he wanted, and he howled in frustration. “It’s not enough, it’s not enough, please..” he muttered.

You closed your eyes.

“Baby, I want you to take a blanket and put it between your thighs for me. Tell me when you are ready.”

Michael’s trembling hands reached out for his favorite fleece blanket, crumpled it hurriedly and placed it between his thighs. He hooked the waistband of his pants and yanked them down his long legs along with his boxers. A broken moan slipped of his tongue when the tip of his cock brushed against the fuzzy fabric.

“Ready, sweetheart?” you wondered in anticipation. The sweet little mewls escaping the boy’s mouth were driving you crazy. Your pussy was throbbing at the thought of ruining him, messing up his curls, and making those blue eyes water with the unbearable neediness.

“Y-yes”, Michael answered waiting for the next order.

“Now I want you to slowly start humping it”, you said, voice dripping with seduction, “while thinking of my hands sliding down your body, caressing every inch of the exposed skin. C’mon, move your hips in circles.”

His skin felt like it was on fire. His abdomen tensed as he started drawing figure eight with his hips, and he had to bite at the corner of the pillow to muffle his moans.

“Let me hear you,” you whispered while rubbing your clit, “God, I wish I could see you. Tell me how does humping feel, hmm?”

Michael moaned in response. His long fingers formed a fist around the tip of his cock and started sliding up and down the length, matching the thrusts of his hips.

“Feels so good”, he murmured. He licked his dry lips and sighed heavily before asking, “could you, please...argh...” Michael hissed when he accidentally slid his thumb along the slit, “Please...”

“What do you want, Michael?” you urged him to speak up.

“When you asked if I’d been a good boy”, he couldn’t believe he was actually about to ask for that, “you called yourself mommy, and I really liked it,” he rolled his head to the side feeling so damn embarrassed and pathetic.

“Oh, baby,” the boy was insufferable. You spread your pussy and inserted two fingers simultaneously, pumping them in and out, “imagine that it’s mommy’s cunt is clenching around your cock.”

Michael was on all fourth, jerking himself off violently. When a sinful “mommy” rolled off your lips, he bit on his knuckles trying to suppress a desperate squeak.

“I told you not to hold your moans in,” his heart skipped a beat when he heard the stern tone of your voice. “If you want to be quite so desperately, open your mouth and start sucking on your fingers.”

And he obeyed like a good boy. Michael brought his free hand to his lips and stuck his tongue out to lick at the tips of his fingers.

“That’s a good boy”, you moaned at the sloppy sound of his lips sucking on his digits. “Keep going.”

You hoped that he was getting close because your own orgasm started building up inside you with every push of your fingers.

“Mommy, I’m close,” you smiled at Michael’s whimpers. You were definitely in sync.

“I know, baby”, you squeezed your thighs flexing your pelvic floor muscles. “Mommy’s close, too.”

“Please, may I come?” he pleaded, and who were you to refuse him?

“Cum for me, kitten,” you moaned feeling your orgasm unfold, and flooding every cell of your body. “My pretty boy, you’ve been so, so good.”

With a broken cry, Michael let go, and came in his fist, staining his blanket with white stripes despite his attempts not to make it messy. You wished you could have seen his face. Fuck, for the first time you actually wondered what your client looked like.

Michael rolled over on his back. Coming down from his high, he felt ethereal. Starting at the ceiling, he couldn’t believe that a stranger had made him come so hard. He looked at his sticky hand and closed his eyes. Holly shit.

“Thank you,” he whispered and heard your soft chuckle.

“The pleasure was all mine,” you said with a smile and quietly whimpered at the feeling of dump panties between your legs.

You should have already thanked Michael for the call, charged for his time, and hung up, but instead, you were still on the phone with him.

“Hey, listen,” Michael cleared his throat, “is there any way I can contact you later?”

A wide grin spread across your lips.

“Yes, you can use this number. I work from 8 to 11pm.”

You were not going to make it easy for him.

Taglist: @langdons-rep @babypinkstyles94 @sammythankyou @kaigitana @ms-mead @sebastianshoe @langdonsdemon @iloveziggystardust @chaoticevillangdon @sojournmichael @sloppy-little-witch-bitch26 @theghostoflangdon @divinelangdon @avesatanormalpeoplescareme @ticklish-leafy-plant @bbyduncan

People who might like it: @ccodyfern @1-800-bitchcraft @ritualmichael @wroteclassicaly

#michael langdon smut #michael langdon x reader #michael langdon imagine #duncan shepherd smut #ahs apocalypse

542 notes · View notes

fantasyfandommaiden · 5 years

Text

ML Counsellor AU: Chat’s Mentorship

Chat goes to Carmine for advice, or perhaps a kind ear a few days after Hero’s Day... however he gets so much more than that.

[[MORE]]

Carmine found herself once again enjoying the beautiful nightlife of Paris from her balcony, sipping her tea as she thought over what had happened not even two days ago. Hero’s Day had been a success, although it almost lead to Hawkmoth becoming victorious and gaining the Ladybug and Hawkmoth Miraculous.

The hero’s, along with Queen Bee, Rena Rouge, and Carapace, managed to win however and she couldn’t be prouder of them all.

Carmine felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, and after a quick glance around she saw Chat Noir standing on the ruff opposite of her, pacing and periodically looking at her balcony, debating with himself.

The woman raised a brow, before raising a hand and giving him a wave. He took that as an invitation and hopped on over. Carmine noted that he seemed depressed and wasn’t even trying to hide it as he sat down on one of her balcony chairs. “Hello Chat, to what due I owe this unexpected visit?” She asked, smiling at him.

“... do you think I am a good partner to Ladybug, or a good sidekick?” He asked softly. Carmine blinked at the question, looking at the teen with a curious expression.

“... what brought this on? You guys defeated Hawkmoth again today, despite all that happened.” She told him, placing her tea cup down as she turned her body to face Chat Noir, who still did not look at her, instead down at his feet.

“... Ladybug comes up with the plans, she knows all the other hero’s identities, where I only know Queen Bee’s. She gets to talk to the Guardian, where he will only come to me when he feels ‘it is necessary’, like I am some sort of after-thought, and I know Ladybug has been seeing him outside of getting the Miraculous during battles, she’s probably getting some sort of cool training.” Chat said sadly “I know it isn’t her secret to tell, and I get that, but we are suppose to be a team! We’re partners, two halves of a whole, but the more time passes, it feels like it’s less of two halves of a whole and more like two parts with one part taking up 80%...” he looked at Carmine finally, a sad expression on his face “I know that out of the two of us, Ladybug has a bigger job, What with her Miraculous Ladybug repairing the city after the attacks, but lately... I feel more like a sidekick than a partner.”

Carmine felt her heart clench as she could almost feel Chat’s sadness and grief at the thought of not being as important as Ladybug, and it would seem that what Pollen had told her about the Guardian not being as attentive to Chat as he was to Ladybug was true. She took a deep breath to calm herself and her thoughts before speaking.

“Have you discussed these feelings with Ladybug, or the Guardian?” She asked him softly.

Chat shook his head “No. Ladybug has enough on her plate to deal with, and like I said, the Guardian will only come when he feels it is necessary. I just... I want to feel like I’m contributing more, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like a sidekick!” He said, standing up “She has two powers, I have one. She comes up with the plans, I follow them. She knows everyone’s identity, I only know Queen Bee’s. She gets a cool mentor, and I have no one! Not even in my civilian life!” Tears began to Form in the corners of his eyes.

Carmine looked at Chat, her mind racing a mile a minute. He needed structure, to feel a purpose, to feel as if he belonged somewhere, that he could help Ladybug, and he seemed to express he wanted the same sort of relationship Ladybug and the Guardian had...

She sighed, feeling as if this situation could end up flavourful, or just prove to make things worse for the boy if her idea wouldn’t work. She stood up “... come with me.” She said, opening the door of her balcony and inviting Chat inside.

The cat hero blinked slightly, following Carmine in. Once inside, she closed the door, and drew the blinds to close as well. “I want you to look around this room, and tell me if you feel anything off about it.” She instructed simply, going to on of her chairs and sitting down.

Chat looked at her with a raised brow “... something off about it? How do you mean?” He asked confused. He thought she was going to help him with his problems, not give him some sort of odd task.

Carmine looked at him with a neutral expression “Humour me, what is odd about this room?” She asked him.

Chat continued to look at her for a few moments before shrugging and looked around the room. Her apartment had an open concept, with the kitchen, living room and dinning room all being in the same main area, and it was well furnished. Chat noted it reminded him a bit of Marinette’s or Nino’s homes, where it felt lived in and loved, as opposed to his own which felt dead inside.

He continued to look around, not finding anything off about it until his eyes landed on ottoman that was in the middle of the floor. He didn’t know why he felt drawn to it, it was the same shade as her couch, a dark grey colour with a padded seat on top, but something about it seemed... weird to him. Like it drew him in closer.

He walked over to it, glancing at Carmine who continued to have a neutral expression on her face as he opened the ottoman and saw lots and lots of blankets inside. He slowly took them out, careful to not get his claws snagged in any of the fabric until it was emptied. Chat scowled slightly, the weird feeling not going away, so he went to knock the bottom of the ottoman to see if it was hollow, the moment he touched it however it opened up as if by magic.

He blinked and slowly looked down, the bottom seeming to be much larger than it should be and saw several well worn leather books inside.

“Interesting....” Carmine finally said and Chat looked at her with a raised brow.

“How did it do that? What are these?”

“Chat, during the Middle Ages, when a terrible sickness spread across the land, it was known as the Black?” She asked suddenly, looking at him.

Chat blinked, looking at Carmine confused before slowly answering.

“Plague?”

“And were birds have talons, cats have?”

“Claws?”

“The opposite of out is?”

“In-“ Chat’s eyes widened in realization as the words left his mouth, the magic quickly disappearing as Adrien appeared where Chat once was, Plagg floating beside him. The Black Cat kwami gave a large stretch, looking around, seeming momentarily surprised, and opened his mouth to speak however Carmine cut him off.

“I’m the fridge in the cheese drawer.” She said simply, looking at Adrien with an odd expression he couldn’t place, it looked like her mind was going a hundred miles a minute before she finally spoke.

“Yes I’ve known for a while, no I haven’t told anyone, yes I know who Plagg is.” She said simply before standing up and walking over to where Adrien stood, kneeling down beside him she dug into the ottoman before brining out a leather book that seemed newer compared to the others and began to look through it, closing the ottoman before sitting on it. “How did you know this was there?” She asked him, still looking at the book, flipping pages seeming to be searching for something.

“Umm....” Adrien, still in shock about all of this, spoke slowly “I felt a pull... like something was weird about it, even thought it looked normal?” He said slowly.

“Interesting...” She said slowly, finding the page she seemed to be looking for and standing up “That means you have some magical awareness at least, whether that is due to a blood line or the Miraculous we will have to wait and see.”

“Wait and see what?” Adrien asked hesitantly.

Carmine looked at him, a serious expression on her face “... You are right that the treatment you have been receiving isn’t exactly fair, even if some secrets need to be kept, it’s not fair that only Ladybug gets the benefit of seeing the Guardian all the time and you don’t.” She walked over to the kitchen and Adrien slowly followed, still in shock at being found out so easily. He noted that Plagg was sitting on the counter, eating some Camembert happily. “I am not Guardian, however I imagine we had similar training in a sense.”

“Your a Guardian too?!” Adrien asked, eyes widened.

Carmine let out a low laugh, looking over her shoulder at Adrien with a smirk “Oh no Adrien... I am a mage. Mages are the reason the Miraculous came into existence in the first place.” She turned around to face him, smiling “And if the Guardian doesn’t feel the need to train you in the magical arts, that is his loss, for if you will have me, I will train you.”

Adrien’s eyes widened, looking at Carmine in bewilderment. He would get training and a mentor, he would have someone who knew his identity, who he didn’t need to hide from. Someone who could understand what he was going through without having to lie about the reason... he would be able to help Ladybug more!

He grinned widely, a feeling of excitement washing over him for the first time since the Hero’s Day picnic. He could do this.

“When do we start?”

#long post #counsellor au #ml au #ladybug au #carmine regal #chat noir #adrien agreste #mentorship

36 notes · View notes

samosoapsoup · 3 years

Text

Living with a Visionary

For more than fifty years, my wife and I shared a world. Then, as Diana’s health declined, her hallucinations became her own reality.

By John Matthias

January 25, 2021

You would think it was a performance of some kind. When she wakes up, if she has slept at all, she tells me about the giants carrying trees and bushes on what she calls zip lines, which I am able to identify as telephone wires. Beneath the busy giants, she explains, there is a marching band playing familiar tunes by John Philip Sousa. She is not especially impressed by either of these things, and the various children playing games in the bedroom annoy her. “Out you go,” she says to them. Then she describes the man with no legs who spent the night lying beside her in bed. He had been mumbling in pain, but nobody would come to help him. She remembers her own pain, too. “I could hardly move,” she says.

And she can hardly move now. Her legs are stiff, her back is cracking as I lift her out of bed. Although still clearly in pain, she gives me a sly look and gestures with her chin toward the flowerpot in the hallway. “The Flowery Man,” she says. “He’s very nice.”

She is fully articulate, in many ways her familiar self. She asks me if I saw the opera. I’m not sure which opera she means; we’ve seen many over the fifty years that we’ve been married. She means the one last night in our back yard. She describes it in detail—the stage set, the costumes, the “really amazing” lighting, the beautiful voices. I ask her what opera was performed. Now I get another look, not a sly one but a suspicious one.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

I say that it’s not a matter of belief but of perception. I can’t see what she sees. She tells me that this is a great pity. I miss so much of life. I used to have something of an imagination, but I’ve evidently lost it. Maybe she should start spending time with someone else. Also, she knows about my girlfriend. The one in the red jacket. There is no girlfriend, but there is a red jacket hanging over the back of her walker. Suddenly, she forgets the girlfriend and remembers the opera. “Oh,” she says. “It was ‘La Traviata,’ and we went together with Anna Netrebko before she sang.”

Now I have my own brief vision. Diana is only twenty-one, I am twenty-five. We have just arrived in South Bend, where I am teaching English at Notre Dame. A friend wrote about us in those days as having appeared to him like two fawns in the grove of our local Arcadia. Diana wore the clothes she had brought from England, including her miniskirt, and people in cars would honk their horns and stare. In London, where we had met, it had been the middle of the nineteen-sixties; at our Midwestern college, it was more like the fifties. A former student told me that when I held classes at home, for a change of scene, he and his classmates took bets on who would be lucky enough to talk to her.

I see her walking in from the kitchen with tea and her homemade scones. College boys—only boys were admitted back then—lift china cups balanced on wafer-thin saucers. Some have never eaten a crumbly scone or sipped tea out of such a delicate cup. Diana is often told she looks like Julie Christie, and my students all want to be Omar Sharif, Christie’s co-star in “Doctor Zhivago.” Some write poems inspired by Lara, Zhivago’s muse. Diana smiles at them, greeting those whose names she remembers. Hello, Vince. Hi there, Richard. She dazzles them. She dazzles me.

Art was her passion. Later, she earned an art-history degree and became the curator of education at our university’s museum. She devised a program of what she called “curriculum-structured tours,” ambitiously proposing to organize museum tours that would be relevant to any class. This she did—chemistry students learned about the properties of seventeenth-century paint, psychology majors studied portraits for signs of their subjects’ mental health—and eventually she exported her innovations to other college campuses. Because of her, students began looking seriously at paintings and sculptures. They followed her hand, pointing out some luminous detail; they listened to the music of her voice, her British accent slowly becoming Americanized over the decades.

Diana trained a new set of gallery interns each year, teaching them about all there was to see and find in the museum’s art. She loved them dearly, and they loved her back. She had been conducting tours for thirty years when a former intern, Maria, came by the house—ostensibly on an errand to collect some of Diana’s library books. Really, she wanted to talk to me. She explained that Diana had started seeing things. The first time Maria noticed it, Diana was showing a class of French students a reduction of Charles Louis-Lucien Müller’s “The Roll Call of the Last Victims of the Reign of Terror,” from 1860. It’s a very busy painting, with dozens of figures waiting to be transported to the guillotine. Diana told the students that at the center of “The Roll Call” was a man named General Marius. But General Marius wasn’t there; he was around the corner, in a painting called “Marius and the Gaul,” about which Diana had written her thesis, many years before. She was speaking in French, and at first Maria thought that Diana had got tangled up in the language. Surely it was her words, not her reality, that had become so confused.

Not too long after Maria’s visit, Diana returned home one day looking tired and depressed. She sat down on the sofa next to me, took my hand, and said, “The students tell me that I’m seeing things that aren’t there.” I admitted that Maria had already told me about this. By then, Diana had begun treatment for Parkinson’s disease, taking a standard cocktail of medicines in small amounts: levodopa combined with carbidopa, in a drug called Sinemet. She had received the diagnosis only because her doctor couldn’t otherwise explain her onset of general weakness. Aside from fatigue, she had virtually no symptoms, and her behavior had been absolutely normal while taking Sinemet. Now she confessed that she was seeing things at home as well. She pointed at a wadded-up sweater on a chair across the room. “That’s not really a cat, is it?”

I asked her what else she saw. “Little people,” she explained, “like Gulliver’s Lilliputians.” Objects had been changing shape—“morphing” was her word—for some time, but recently things had begun appearing out of nowhere. We saw a specialist in Chicago, who, like the neurologists Eric Ahlskog and Oliver Sacks, called these “illusions.” We suspected that the hallucinations were a side effect of Sinemet, and, after consulting many books and articles, Diana and I began to titrate her medication ourselves. Most Parkinson’s patients end up doing this, experimenting with how much they take of each medicine and at what time. There were new delivery systems for the basic mix of levodopa and carbidopa, and we tried them all, along with a number of adjuvant therapies.

At first, Diana could identify her illusions as such, and sometimes even dismiss them. (“Scat!” got rid of the cat.) The things she saw were not always frightening. Many of them seemed inspired by her work in the visual arts. Visiting a neighbor, Diana enthusiastically described a painting on a blank wall where, we later learned, one had been hanging until several days before. Her knowledge of eighteenth-century art may in part explain her delight in seeing topiary figures cut into very large trees, where I saw nothing but leaves. Some of the visions she told me about were clearly breathtaking. “If only you could see this,” she said.

I couldn’t see what she saw, but I could see her. She was somehow growing more beautiful—or beautiful in a new way. Everyone noticed this. Never one to use much makeup or even visit a hair stylist, she would wash her face in the morning, put up her hair or let it hang at shoulder length, and come downstairs to start her day. Her striking good looks belied the condition that would bring her down. It was Julie Christie all over again, but not from “Doctor Zhivago”; she was the aging Christie of Sarah Polley’s movie “Away from Her.” Adapted from Alice Munro’s story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the film is about a woman with Alzheimer’s disease. Her decline is slow, until it is suddenly fast. Diana watched the movie without anxiety. She had not, so far, suffered any significant memory loss. When I reminded her that decades earlier my students had compared her to the actress, she laughed. During a trip to Chicago to see her doctor, we had been approached by a man on the street, who said, “I just have to tell you how beautiful you are. Forgive me for intruding on your day.” We got into a taxi, and Diana growled to me, “I sure don’t feel very beautiful.”

For two or three years, Diana’s condition was manageable through modifications in her medications, and through her ability to recognize the hallucinations for what they were. At the art gallery, she avoided confusion by writing out scripts for her tours. She managed to retire when she was scheduled to, not before. It was shortly afterward that her hallucinations began to increase in frequency and intensity. She insisted that the topiary trees were the work of giants, and she described the giants’ elaborate uniforms. Plays and operas were staged in our back yard, spontaneous parades appeared in the streets.

It became harder and harder for her to understand that her visions were not real. She sometimes asked me why these events were not written about in the paper or covered in the news on television. In the house, nothing held still: objects danced on the mantel, the ideograms on our hanging scroll of Chinese calligraphy flew around like butterflies. At the beginning, many of these transformations had given her pleasure. More and more, however, they annoyed and alarmed her. Three women were “hanging” in her closet and refused to leave. The Flowery Man roamed the house. There were rude people who masturbated into a dresser drawer and had sex on the living-room sofa.

When Diana could no longer shake these things off, she began to surrender to them. She slowly ceased to see them as hallucinations. I had read that it did not help to deny the reality of these visions, so I stopped doing that. I began trying to deal with them as if I could see what she did. Friends were encouraged to make the same allowances. For a while this helped. A fifth person at a dinner for four did not pose a big problem once you got used to this kind of thing. I informed the members of Diana’s reading group that she might refer to people who weren’t there, and they, too, made the adjustment.

One day, she shouted for my help. A housepainter in white overalls, she told me, was painting over the portrait of one of our daughters that hung on the living-room wall. The man didn’t speak; none of Diana’s human apparitions ever spoke, though their mouths would move without sound, and sometimes they would respond to stern rebukes. I could say things like “I’ll see the painter to the door.” But often the damage had been done. In the case of our daughter’s portrait, it continued to exist, for Diana, partially erased. She referred to the painting as “the half-faced child.”

Some medications work for Parkinson’s patients with hallucinations, but for Diana they all seemed to make things worse. In November of 2019, a new kind of confusion about both space and time took hold. One morning, I found her with her suitcase packed, ready to travel. When I asked where she was going, she wasn’t sure. “Away,” she said. She wasn’t sure why. But, she insisted, “we certainly can’t stay any longer in this person’s house, in a place where we don’t even speak the language.”

Christmas approaches, and I return to the present tense. Everything that happens after this feels like it’s still happening now. Slowly, through the winter, Diana’s benign hallucinations become terrible and threatening presences. (Meanwhile, in China, a new and deadly virus is unleashed on the world.) Diana loses her ability to sleep, a common and debilitating feature of Parkinson’s. Because she is either sleepless or tormented by nightmares, I am also unable to sleep. For a while, I am able to soothe her and offer comfort, but often her dreams continue unabated when she wakes up. Eventually, I am simply incorporated into them. When I ask her if she is awake, she says she does not know.

Her eating also becomes a problem, and I know that she is not getting proper nutrition. I use the blender again and again, counting calories, mixing in anything containing protein. She is getting very thin. I sleep only when she sleeps and eat a quick sandwich as I cook for her. She looks at me one morning and says, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Because Diana hides things, then promptly forgets where they are, I often find myself searching for her medical-insurance cards, her driver’s license, some kind of I.D. with her picture on it. She sends me on a wild-goose chase all over the house. This drawer. That closet. But I can never find what we need. The hallucinated people begin to take on more life than the living. And they have names. Not generic and rather charming names like the Flowery Man but monosyllabic American names like Bob, Pete, Dick, George, Jack. No one seems to have a surname. “Jack who?” I ask her. She gives me a straight look and says, “Jack the Ripper.” She keeps asking, “Who’s in charge?” I wish I knew.

In March, as the pandemic descends on the Midwest, I try to explain why she cannot go out or see friends. She doesn’t understand. I don’t dare leave her alone, even for a short trip to the grocery store. She begins going outside when my back is turned, and she frightens some of the neighbors with things she claims to see. I make rules. No phoning friends after 10 p.m. No going outdoors after bed or going downstairs for breakfast in the middle of the night. I finally move to a bed in a separate room.

With the country in lockdown, I can no longer reach Diana’s neurologist in Chicago. Local doctors help us refill some of her medications over the telephone, but have nothing to offer that might help the dementia that is now clearly part of the picture. My most recent reading makes me wonder whether she might have not Parkinson’s but something called Lewy body dementia, which produces vivid hallucinations. Its terrifying symptoms are believed to have led to the suicide of the actor Robin Williams. Diana talks about “jumping in the river.” (The St. Joseph River is only a few hundred yards from our front door.) Neighbors offer to do some shopping for us, but as the pandemic gets worse I hesitate to ask them for more help. When I finally make contact with two or three “senior helper” organizations, I am told that all their programs are on hold. I can do nothing but try to continue on my own. I begin taking pills myself—sedatives washed down with glasses of Merlot. We are living on cans of beans and prescription drugs.

There are still moments when Diana is very happy. Sometimes, she seems to be in a state of bliss. She stands at the open doorway and gazes into the sky. I stand behind her. “Look!” she says. “Why can’t you see?” I tell her that I’m trying, but maybe need some help. She becomes angry and shouts, “The gods! The gods!”

One day, I find Diana clutching a balled-up blanket to her breast. “What have you got?” I ask her. “A dead baby,” she says. I have never seen such terror in her eyes. I have never seen it in anybody’s eyes.

At some point—a day later, two days later—police arrive at the door. In the street, an ambulance is flashing its colored lights. The three policemen at the door have masks on, and I’m initially frightened by this, because I don’t know that many people are now wearing them. Someone has called the police about a lady who lives here who may need to go to the hospital. I stand there gazing stupidly at the policemen. They ask if they can talk to the lady. I tell them she’s my wife. Diana is on the sofa, more or less catatonic.

When I step onto the front porch, I notice some of our neighbors watching from their yards. I am asked questions about Diana and who has been looking after her. I begin to fear that I’m about to be arrested. Someone suggests that maybe it would be good for her to be completely checked out in the E.R., and possibly admitted for a day or so. The next thing I know, two of the ambulance men are bringing a stretcher up to the porch. One of them asks if he can talk to my wife. Finally, I’m able to say something. I say no. They are immediately suspicious. To my amazement, I hear Diana saying, “I’ll talk to them. It’s O.K.” They ask her what’s wrong. She describes a few of her hallucinations. She’s worried about what’s happened to the dead baby. What dead baby? I try to intervene, but already she’s explaining that she had the dead baby in her arms just a moment ago. Perhaps it has rolled away. She gets down on one knee and reaches under the sofa. “Oh, good,” she says, reappearing with the blanket. “Here it is.”

While the medics are conferring with one another, Diana suddenly says, “I think I should go to the hospital.” The ambulance guys seem delighted by this. Diana is put on the stretcher, and the ambulance disappears. No one asks what I think should be done. No one asks me to come along. In the confusion, the blanket has been left on the front porch. When everyone is gone, I take it inside.

That night, Diana is admitted to the hospital for observation. I won’t be able to visit her, because of covid restrictions. I am frantic: they’ll get all the Parkinson’s meds mixed up, they don’t know her schedule. What will happen if she misses a dose of Sinemet?

What transpires in the next days and weeks is sometimes vividly clear and sometimes swirling in a surrealistic fog. At some point, it is decided that I, too, should be examined in the hospital. In the E.R., I am told that I am suffering from exhaustion, malnutrition, and dehydration. I end up on the same floor as Diana. By the time I arrive, she has told everyone that she is a movie director working on a documentary about art therapy in hospitals. From my bed, I explain to her doctors, who are different from my own, as much of her medical history as I can. I am allowed to talk to Diana only by phone.

Social workers keep appearing with documents for me to sign. My daughter Laura and I have agreed, in theory, that eventually Diana will have to move into an assisted-living community. A new facility for patients with dementia has recently been built near Laura’s house, in Worthington, Ohio. Laura wants to take Diana there, and I have to admit that I am no longer able to look after her. I am barely able to look after myself. I sign the papers giving Laura power of attorney for Diana and me. There are decisions to be made, bills to be paid, and I am flat on my back in the hospital.

Covid is tearing through the country. The hospital is filling up with patients, my bed is in demand. My doctors ask if I want to be sent home or to spend three days in the psychiatric hospital associated with the general hospital where I am being treated. They talk about rest, recovery.

Where I end up is not a health spa but more like a boot camp. Before I am moved, all my possessions are taken away. No shoelaces, no belt. At the new facility, I am given a handful of large and small pills every three hours. At night, all patients are on suicide watch. I barely sleep. While I am in the psych ward, Diana is driven in a long-distance ambulance to the care facility in Ohio, where, after a fourteen-day quarantine, she will now live. How Diana deals with this news, what she understands and doesn’t understand, I do not know. She still thinks she is directing a documentary film. I am not allowed to see her before she leaves.

In the second psych ward where I find myself remanded, I am the oldest patient by far. The program of endless group therapies seems designed for adolescents. At seventy-nine, I am too weak to do many of the things demanded of me. When I do not immediately respond to the pills I’m given, there is talk of electroconvulsive therapy. I object, and an online hearing is convened, where a judge concludes that, although I must stay beyond the hospital’s mandatory seventy-two-hour observation period, I do not have to undergo shock therapy.

Meanwhile, I am terrified of covid. Locked out of our rooms for most of the day, we are all in one another’s way, and patients share a common bathroom. One day, I am required to cut off my beard. Looking at myself in the mirror, I discover the corners of my mouth locked in a permanent grimace. The beard has hidden this from me: I can’t smile.

I try to explain to the staff that there has been some kind of mistake, that I need to rescue my wife, who has been taken to Ohio. The things I say to the nurses and therapists must sound mad. When I am finally allowed to see the chief psychiatrist, I hear the desperation in my voice. I watch the unbelieving faces of everyone around me, and wonder how often Diana saw the same incredulity in my own face.

Somehow, our family lawyer gets in touch with a woman named Mary, a registered nurse and “personal health-care advocate,” who is the one to finally secure my release from the psychiatric facility. I am asked to sign some papers that I haven’t read, and then I am free. On the way home in an ambulance, driving back the same way Diana came, I consider asking the attendants riding alongside me if they have heard of the Flowery Man, the topiary trees, the little people—any of Diana’s hallucinated cast of characters. For years I have tried as hard as I could to see these things, to share Diana’s view of the passing world. In her absence, returning to the home where I must now begin to live by myself, I long all the more to understand the reality that she inhabits.

When covid insinuated itself into the facility in Worthington, Ohio, in November, I had been at home for five months. For a couple of weeks, I had managed to communicate with Diana through screens. This confused her, though, so we started using the telephone instead. The last time I saw her face was on Zoom. She told me that she had something beginning with the letter “C.” Then she suddenly smiled her wonderful smile. “What a sweet little girl,” she said, following a hallucination with a sharp turn of her head.

Diana almost survived covid. After testing positive, she spent several nights at the hospital, but was sent back to her facility with a normal temperature and a negative test result. For a few days, I was able to imagine seeing her again, even touching her. I had it all figured out. I would be among the first in line to be vaccinated, among the first to embrace a loved one who had been unreachable for so long. I didn’t care how many hallucinated people came along, as long as Diana was around to see them.

Then her blood-oxygen level dropped. She was not likely to live through the night. Laura put the phone to Diana’s ear, and I read the first poem I ever wrote for her—about waking together in a small Left Bank hotel in Paris before we were married. Finally, I started reading from a book of poetry I had written about her struggle. The dedicatory poem is about the Greek goddess Artemis, known by the Romans as Diana. Its final lines return to Diana the mortal, my wife:

If she could change, she Might be like the woman called by her Roman name Reading in a book beside the fire in my own house. She has come down all these years with me

I couldn’t continue. “You’re doing great, Dad,” my daughter said, “but she wants to know about the Flowery Man.” So I told her everything I knew. ♦

John Matthias, a professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, has published some thirty books of poetry, fiction, memoir, translation, and criticism.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/living-with-a-visionary

0 notes

rosemary-butch · 6 years

Note

1-100

aw fuck. aw fuck

putting this on the read more jakdfjakadjfs

Spotify, SoundCloud, or Pandora?

spotify ofc

is your room messy or clean?

i try to keep it clean !

what color are your eyes?

greenish

do you like your name? why?

my full name is okay but i do prefer jo

what is your relationship status?

single lol

describe your personality in 3 words or less

gay, depressed, considerate

what color hair do you have?

dark brown!

what kind of car do you drive? color?

a tan volkswagen passat, but the trunk is a different color and smashed up adfkajsd

where do you shop?

marshalls is always my go to

how would you describe your style?

if you mashed punk, grunge, and california skater boy styles

favorite social media account

prob my twitter bc i actually put intelligent thoughts there

what size bed do you have?

queen !

any siblings?

yes a brother and a half brother

if you can live anywhere in the world where would it be? why?

i’d love to live in the mountains, like colorado!

favorite snapchat filter?

i dont use snapchat filters a lot? the heart one looks cute

favorite makeup brand(s)

i dont wear makeup, but i like burts bees for chapstick

how many times a week do you shower?

at least 6, i try to keep it at 7

favorite tv show?

adventure time rn

shoe size?

womens 10 mens 8

how tall are you?

5′9!

sandals or sneakers?

sneakers

do you go to the gym?

no lol i have a treadmill at home

describe your dream date

hmmm probably going on a picnic in a secluded forest or beach, and staying for the sunset and stargazing

how much money do you have in your wallet at the moment?

cash? none but i have my debit card

what color socks are you wearing?

they’re black and mismatched, one has pink stars and the other has green stripes

how many pillows do you sleep with?

do you have a job? what do you do?

yeah, i work with organic produce at a local farm market

how many friends do you have?

like 3 close friends

whats the worst thing you have ever done?

sneak out probably

whats your favorite candle scent?

anything vanilla or bakery scented! i love cinnamon roll scents

3 favorite boy names

idk i have no opinion

3 favorite girl names

holly daisy or ellen! if i have a daughter i’ll name her one of those

favorite actor?

idk, tom holland prob. i gotta protect him

favorite actress?

daisy ridley !!!!!!

who is your celebrity crush?

daisy ridley!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

favorite movie?

my neighbor totoro lol

do you read a lot? whats your favorite book?

i don’t read as much as i would like, and idk i havent read in a while

money or brains?

idc, as long as they have a good personality

do you have a nickname? what is it?

jo lol, or jojo from some family, or jolene from my close friends

how many times have you been to the hospital?

i’ve been admitted a few times

top 10 favorite songs

uhh going away to college by blink, sleepover by hayley kiyoko, under the bridge by rhcp, longview by green day, mr brightside by the killers, africa by toto, toxic by britney spears, fat lip by sum 41, walking contradiction by green day, and online songs by blink

do you take any medications daily?

yeah antidepressants

what is your skin type? (oily, dry, etc)

dry primarily

what is your biggest fear?

hmmmm men probably

how many kids do you want?

idk, none as of right now but we’ll see

whats your go to hair style?

left alone lol

what type of house do you live in? (big, small, etc)

big i guess? theres an upstairs and a basement

who is your role model?

billie joe armstrong

what was the last compliment you received?

someone liked my piercings yesterday lol

what was the last text you sent?

“Sure that works”

how old were you when you found out santa wasn’t real?

idk, i kinda figured it out between age 7-9

what is your dream car?

jeep liberty

opinion on smoking?

cigarettes? no thanks. major turn off

do you go to college?

yeah

what is your dream job?

working as a biochemist for nasa or finding possible medications in the amazon

would you rather live in rural areas or the suburbs?

rural

do you take shampoo and conditioner bottles from hotels?

no lol i think i’m a minority here

do you have freckles?

yep ! they’re faded

do you smile for pictures?

recently i’ve been trying to

how many pictures do you have on your phone?

1193

have you ever peed in the woods?

nope

do you still watch cartoons?

yes !!

do you prefer chicken nuggets from Wendy’s or McDonalds?

i don’t eat meat but i trust wendys more

Favorite dipping sauce?

honey mustard

what do you wear to bed?

a t shirt and sweatpants or boxers

have you ever won a spelling bee?

yeah in my class lol

what are your hobbies?

knitting, crocheting, watercolor painting

can you draw?

ehh a little

do you play an instrument?

ukulele on occasion

what was the last concert you saw?

i went to the warped tour last year lol

tea or coffee?

tea!

Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts?

tbh wawa, starbucks is too pricey and dunkin is gross

do you want to get married?

yeah!!! i want a wife!

what is your crush’s first and last initial?

are you going to change your last name when you get married?

depends on if their last name is cooler than mine lol, or if they want to change theirs

what color looks best on you?

blacks and dark blues

do you miss anyone right now?

idk i’m pretty null rn

do you sleep with your door open or closed?

open so my cat can go in and out

do you believe in ghosts?

idk, i don’t have a strong opinion

what is your biggest pet peeve?

people being late

last person you called?

my brother on facetime

favorite ice cream flavor?

im lactose intolerant but i love strawberry lmao

regular oreos or golden oreos?

regular ??

chocolate or rainbow sprinkles?

rainbow!! i have to by gay law

what shirt are you wearing?

my brother’s military squadron shirt he gave me

what is your phone background?

spirited away scenery

are you outgoing or shy?

probably in the middle? i don’t put myself out there but i approach people who look lonely

do you like it when people play with your hair?

yes omfg

do you like your neighbors?

they’re old they’re okay

do you wash your face? at night? in the morning?

i used to in the shower but i ran out akdfjasdk

have you ever been high?

yeah

have you ever been drunk?

nope

last thing you ate?

ramen lmao

favorite lyrics right now

hmm idk i haven’t really been listening to lyrics a lot

summer or winter?

summer !

day or night?

night~

dark, milk, or white chocolate?

dark def

favorite month?

may

what is your zodiac sign

aries

who was the last person you cried in front of?

my therapist prob

cat this took me too long thank u (i’m procrastinating)

#amant-lesbienne #ask #akdfjask thank you!!!!!

5 notes · View notes

qodforsakens · 6 years

Text

QUESTIONNAIRE 4 SUFFERING

Q: WHAT IS YOUR MIDDLE NAME ? A: Ashley. Relatively unoriginal, but my mom wanted my middle name to be Blue ( in which case i would have DIED ) Q: HOW OLD ARE YOU ? A: Feel like I’m 12 but I’m almost 20 Q: WHEN IS YOUR BIRTHDAY ? A: March 21st, i’mmA SPRING BABY

Q: WHAT IS YOUR ZODIAC SIGN ? A: Technically an Aries but ig i’m on the “ Pisces Cusp ” ? dk what that means but my mom told me the other day but i feel as if i’ve cheated astrology stuff lols ?

Q: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE COLOR ? A: I don’t really have one, but I like the color pink a lot so maybe pink

Q: WHAT’S YOUR LUCKY NUMBER ? A: Lucky who ?

Q: DO YOU HAVE ANY PETS ? A: Three ! Bailey, Dana and Melvin.

Q: WHERE ARE YOU FROM ? A: Everywhere ? Born in Missoula, Montana / raised in Wisconsin until I was around 12 / went to school in Montana until I was a sophomore / went for a semester of school during sophomore year in Wild Rose, Wisconsin / moved back to a quaint Deer Lodge, Montana until the end of my junior year / moved to Hudson, Wisconsin my senior year of HS and lived there until July 31st / living in the Shithole that is Mondovi, Wisconsin.

Q: HOW TALL ARE YOU ? A: 5′5 3/4″. The 3/4″ is important to note because I’m NEARLY 5′6″ and most everyone in my family is around 6′. I’m dead inside

Q: WHAT SHOE SIZE ARE YOU ? A: Technically a 9.5 but the size varies by brand.

Q: HOW MANY PAIRS OF SHOES DO YOU OWN ? A: Probably nine, but I hardly wear any of them because I work at the fucking time

Q: WHAT WAS YOUR LAST DREAM ABOUT ? A: I remember that I had ANOTHER dream with u in it but I didn’t remember enough about it that it was worth sharing ? But I did wake up feeling like all of my problems were gone so it was a positive dream

Q: WHAT TALENTS DO YOU HAVE ? A: I can learn songs from musicals in no time.

Q: ARE YOU PSYCHIC IN ANY WAY ? A: No, next question

Q: FAVORITE SONG ? A: My favorite song is either You and I ( Lady Gaga, Born This Way ) or The Cure ( also Gaga, current single )

Q: FAVORITE MOVIE ? A: RENT. Hands down my favorite movie of all time. I could watch it on a loop tbh

Q: WHO WOULD BE YOUR IDEAL PARTNER ? A: Someone who understood that I’m really fucking depressive all the time, like, grossly depressive ? I can joke abt wanting to kill myself 500 times and not mean it, but other times I do and I wish ! ppl could read minds bc having to tell someone that I’m depressed makes me hurt worse bc I feel like a Disappointment

Q: DO YOU WANT CHILDREN ? A: I’m not sure if I do. I mean, at nineteen ? No fucking way. In ten years ? Maybe, I’m thinking yes, but to be decided obviously

Q: DO YOU WANT A CHURCH WEDDING ? A: Probably, but not because I’m religious

Q: ARE YOU RELIGIOUS ? A: I don’t follow any religion, but when I’m scared I repeat, “ i believe in God. ” until my freight vanishes

Q: HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO THE HOSPITAL ? A: A few times. Three were the most serious. Broke my wrist, caught Lymes Disease via nasty-ass deer ticks and had a concussion from cheer.

Q: HAVE YOU EVER GOT IN TROUBLE WITH THE LAW ? A: Once, and it actually wasn’t my fault. I was, hello, gay-baited and naive, and the gal that gay-baited me told me that it was LEGAL to spray paint. Because it was Montana, I didn’t get into much trouble but was supposed to go to a local courthouse to clear up w/e had happened which never occurred bc not even a month later were we moving to Wisconsin

Q: HAVE YOU EVER MET ANY CELEBRITIES ? A: One but he’s gross so : /

Q: BATHS OR SHOWERS ? A: Showers but only if I don’t have bath bombs to use

Q: WHAT COLOR SOCKS ARE YOU WEARING ? A: Currently none bc I’m in bed and it’s 4:13 a.m.

Q: HAVE YOU EVER BEEN FAMOUS ? A: Thankfully not

Q: WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE A BIG CELEBRITY ? A: Maybe a Broadway star or jazz singer but other than that ? Pass

Q: WHAT TYPE OF MUSIC DO YOU LIKE ? A: MOSTLY SHOW TUNES, BUT GAGA / QUEEN / DAVID BOWIE

Q: HAVE YOU EVER BEEN SKINNY DIPPING ? A: Don’t have the gall to tbh

Q: HOW MANY PILLOWS DO YOU SLEEP WITH ? A: I think six ? Too lazy to count rn

Q: WHAT POSITION DO YOU SLEEP IN ? A: I fall asleep laying on my side, facing the wall, with my legs folded like ? behind me but i always wake up laying on my back so

Q: HOW BIG IS YOUR HOUSE ? A: uh average ?

Q: WHAT DO YOU TYPICALLY HAVE FOR BREAKFAST ? A: I rarely eat which doesn’T show but I sleep and work too much to fit breakfast into an every day schedule

Q: HAVE I EVER FIRED A GUN ? A: My dad is a white male AND a conservative from Montana, u tell me

Q: HAVE YOU TRIED ARCHERY ? A: In high school bc I needed to do it to pass P.E. but it was not my thing

Q: FAVORITE CLEAN WORD ? A: idk if i have one ? i say Mood all the time but that’s not a favorite

Q: FAVORITE SWEAR WORD ? A: Bitchin’

Q: WHAT’S THE LONGEST YOU’VE GONE WITHOUT SLEEP ? A: Around 25-ish hours ? I can’t handle that anymore tho

Q: DO YOU HAVE ANY SCARS ? A: I have a handful of scars on my forehead bc of an Incident in kindergarten, a scar on my left earlobe bc a dog almost ripped my fucking earlobe off and one on my right big toe due to my brother not telling me abt the glass he broke and didn’t clean up : ) that one cut to the bone : ) and a few on my left arm lols

Q: Have you ever had a secret admirer ? A: Not attractive enough tbh

Q: ARE YOU A GOOD LIAR ? A: I don’t lie on per the norm so no. I smile too much tbh

Q: ARE YOU A GOOD JUDGE OF CHARACTER ? A: Usually not.

Q: CAN YOU DO ANY OTHER ACCENTS OTHER THAN YOUR OWN ? A: I can slip into accents for .00006 seconds but no one ever hears them

Q: DO YOU HAVE A STRONG ACCENT ? A: God I wish

Q: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE ACCENT ? A: Boston / Mass accents.

Q: WHAT IS YOUR PERSONALITY TYPE ? A: This requires me to take a long-ass test n i’m not gna do that rn

Q: WHAT IS YOUR MOST EXPENSIVE PIECE OF CLOTHING ? A: Probably my $70-$80 jeans that are now Ruined

Q: CAN YOU CURL YOUR TONGUE ? A: Mhm

Q: ARE YOU AN INNIE OR AN OUTIE ? A: Innie

Q: LEFT OR RIGHT HANDED ? A: Right

Q: ARE YOU AFRAID OF SPIDERS ? A: Naturally

Q: FAVORITE FOOD ? A: Highkey Gyros

Q: FAVORITE FOREIGN FOOD ? A: GYROS

Q: ARE YOU A CLEAN OR MESSY PERSON ? A: Both : (

Q: MOST USED PHRASE ? A: haHahahA whatta mood !

Q: MOST USED WORD ? A: Mood

Q: HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE FOR YOU TO GET READY ? A: Two hours

Q: DO YOU HAVE MUCH OF AN EGO ? A: Probably best known for forgetting things

Q: DO YOU SUCK OR BITE LOLLIPOPS ? A: suck eM

Q: DO YOU TALK TO YOURSELF ? A: Probably

Q: DO YOU SING TO YOURSELF ? A: All the time

Q: ARE YOU A GOOD SINGER ? A: I’ve been told that I am by a handful of ppl but who knows

Q: BIGGEST FEAR ? A: Drowning, burning to death or being stabbed in either lung bc yiKEs

Q: ARE YOU A GOSSIP ? A: Not necessarily tbh

Q: BEST DRAMATIC MOVIE YOU’VE SEEN ? A: Baby driver but it wasn’t rlly dramatic ?

Q: DO YOU LIKE LONG OR SHORT HAIR ? A: On me, it’s a tie tbh. I love long hair until I have it n then I want it shoRT SO

Q: CAN YOU NAME ALL 50 STATES OF AMERICA ? A: If I have a while to think abt them then yes. If not, no

Q: FAVORITE SCHOOL SUBJECT ? A: English / Language

Q: EXTROVERT OR INTROVERT ? A: Intro x100

Q: HAVE YOU EVER BEEN SCUBA DIVING ? A: No and I don’t want to

Q: WHAT MAKES YOU NERVOUS ? A: Being honest abt how I feel regardless of context

Q: ARE YOU SCARED OF THE DARK ? A: I’m the Biggest baby so yes

Q: DO YOU CORRECT PEOPLE WHEN THEY MAKE MISTAKES ? A: Not verbally bc I wasn’t raised in the jungle

Q: ARE YOU TICKLISH ? A: EvERYWHERE

Q: HAVE YOU EVER STARTED A RUMOR ? A: Gross, no

Q: HAVE YOU EVER BEEN IN A POSITION OF AUTHORITY ? A: Once for a hs class assignment but I’m the only one who worked on the project in the long-run

Q: HAVE YOU EVER DRANK UNDERAGE ? A: mhm

Q: HAVE YOU EVER DONE DRUGS ? A: Only smoked weed tbh

Q: WHO WAS YOUR FIRST REAL CRUSH ? A: My kindergarten boyfriend, how the turntables

Q: HOW MANY PIERCINGS DO YOU HAVE ? A: Eleven

Q: CAN YOU ROLL YOUR Rs ? A: Barely !

Q: HOW FAST CAN YOU TYPE ? A: Pretty fast, idk the wpm tho

Q: HOW FAST CAN YOU RUN ? A: What is this, middle school ?

Q: WHAT COLOR IS YOUR HAIR ? A: Bleached bitch

Q: WHAT COLOR ARE YOUR EYES ? A: Brown

Q: WHAT ARE YOU ALLERGIC TO ? A: Cats, unfortunately

Q: DO YOU KEEP A JOURNAL ? A: I don’t but should

Q: WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS DO ? A: My dad is a licensed Electrician and my mom works at a grocery store

Q: DO YOU LIKE YOUR AGE ? A: I feel 12 yall

Q: WHAT MAKES YOU ANGRY ? A: Being mocked or people bickering with me over something that I’m obviously right about

Q: DO YOU LIKE YOUR OWN NAME ? A: Skye is a shit name tbh, would change it to Liz if my parents wouldn’t freak out about it.

Q: HAVE YOU ALREADY THOUGHT OF BABY NAMES, AND IF SO WHAT ARE THEY ? A: I love feminine / strong / unisex names.

Q: DO YOU WANT A BOY OR GIRL FOR A CHILD ? A: Idk probably either

Q: WHAT ARE YOUR STRENGTHS ? A: Doubting everyone

Q: WHAT ARE YOUR WEAKNESSES ? A: Assuming the worst of ppl

Q: HOW DID YOU GET YOUR NAME ? A: Well, my mom wrote a list of names on a sheet of paper and my dad liked Skye so here we are. I was almost a Chloe / Mercedes / Samantha.

Q: WERE YOUR ANCESTORS ROYALTY ? A: Obviously not

Q: COLOR OF YOUR BEDSPREAD ? A: Black ONLY because my main sheets had been washed recently and I haven’t changed back

Q: COLOR OF YOUR ROOM ? A: Yellow but not by choice

And the meme is from HERE. Tagging @heartcraves but u genuinely don’t have to do this bc it took me almost two hours so please spare yourself

#personal tbt.#i wanted to stop @ question 19 but here we are #this Goes to my mom who says i haVE NO FOLLOW THRU

5 notes · View notes

happyk44 · 6 years

Note

1-100 all

ONE HUNDRED FUCKING QUESTIONS

1.. what is you middle name?

Marie.

2. how old are you?

A number.

3. what is your birthday?

April 25th

4. what is your zodiac sign?

Taurus.

5. what is your favorite color?

BLUE.

6. what’s your lucky number?

Fuck, I don’t have my sheet in front of me rn but I’m confident there’s a 3 somewhere among it.

7. do you have any pets?

3 cats: Turbo (mine), Olive (my sister), Daisy (mom and dad)

8. where are you from?

BERMUDA.

9. how tall are you?

5 foot 2 and a quarter

10. what shoe size are you?

8 ½

11. how many pairs of shoes do you own?

Currently?? 3. Sneakers, slip-ons (which I don’t wear now that the ground is wet all the time) and boots.

12. what was your last dream about?

Idk.

13. what talents do you have?

Idk again. Writing seems to be up there.

14. are you psychic in any way?

No.

15. favorite song?

Changes all the time but currently? Way Down Hadestown, Rewrite the Stars, This Is Me, The Greatest Show, Epic (Part 3), Chant, Riptide, Take Me to Church.

16. favorite movie?

Power Rangers

17. who would be your ideal partner?

Uh, idk. Someone who likes to cuddle, doesn’t mind being affectionate but can give space when needed and doesn’t let me fall back on my own shit. Someone who can make me smile just by thinking about them. Someone who I can talk to about the stuff I enjoy and who will talk about the stuff they like, even if they’re not common interests.

18. do you want children?

Not really.

19. do you want a church wedding?

No.

20. are you religious?

No, but my dad wishes (and probably thinks) I am.

21. have you ever been to the hospital?

YEP! Gotta love asthma attacks and chronic sickness :P

Also occassional visits to my papa (rip) when my granny would go on vacation and placed him in the hospital’s care for brief times because of his dementia.

22. have you ever got in trouble with the law?

Nope.

23. have you ever met any celebrities?

None that I’m aware of.

24. baths or showers?

Showers.

25. what color socks are you wearing?

Black.

26. have you ever been famous?

Nope.

27. would you like to be a big celebrity?

Mmm, not really. All that attention seems terrifying. But like, if I could be, celebrity enough that I’m well-known among people and get good wages doing whatever, then yes.

28. what type of music do you like?

All kinds. I have aversions to stuff that picks at my ears wrong or makes my heart beat too fast, though, so a lot of hard metal and soca wind up being out.

29. have you ever been skinny dipping?

Yes. I was a toddler. Clothing means nothing when you’re a baby and live in a hot-ass humid climate.

30. how many pillows do you sleep with?

31. what position do you usually sleep in?

On my side or on my stomach. I’ve been trying to sleep on my back lately though.

32. how big is your house?

Small.

33. what do you typically have for breakfast?

Cereal.

34. have you ever fired a gun?

To my knowledge, yes.

35. have you ever tried archery?

Yes.

36. favorite clean word?

Shiz :D

37. favorite swear word?

Fuck.

38. what’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sleep?

29ish hours? I stayed up one day to chat with a person who lived in Australia, wound up having to go to the store with my mom around 8 to get school clothes and crashed when we got back home about noon/one o’clock.

Though this month should raise that up higher given I have to be up for my exams starting at 9, stay up to catch my early morning flight the next day and stay up to catch my transfer flight and then keep staying up so I don’t crash through dinner and wake up at like one in the morning, like someone with jet lag. (Bermuda and Halifax are literally in the same time zone, I cannot do this to myself)

39. do you have any scars?

Yes. It stretches shortly on my forearm. I got it from an iron burn when I was about 12, I think?

40. have you ever had a secret admirer?

I think so?? If that’s what you’d call whoever keeps sending me those really sweet anons. :D

41. are you a good liar?

Sometimes.

42. are you a good judge of character?

I’d like to think so.

43. can you do any other accents other than your own?

I can do a semi-decent Irish/Scottish accent from my years of obsessively watching Ronan Inish and a thicker, more prominent Bermudian accent, like what my granny or teachers would have.

44. do you have a strong accent?

I don’t personally think I have an accent. My mom is deaf, my dad is American and the kids and family I grew up around never really used the thick version of a Bermudian accent.

45. what is your favorite accent?

I don’t know. I don’t think I have one? Mostly other accents are just the way people talk and if anything, just amuse me. Like for example, my friend’s Bahamian accent kills me, especially when she starts chatting with her friends from Nassau and their accents start rolling out super thick to the point where you gotta really pay attention to zero in on their words.

But, in Bermuda you’re taught by literally anyone so accents are just?? a thing that exist. I don’t have a favourite.

46. what is your personality type?

MBTI wise, a split between INTJ & INTP. Other types? IDK.

47. what is your most expensive piece of clothing?

PFT, prolly my shoes? I don’t really buy clothes. Though if my cousin’s coat no longer fits by the time the cold really hits and I need to use it, it’ll probably be a winter coat.

48. can you curl your tongue?

Yes.

49. are you an innie or an outie?

Innie

50. left or right handed?

Right handed.

51. are you scared of spiders?

Small spiders? No.

Giant spiders? Yes.

Weird looking spiders? Only if they’re too close to me.

52. favorite food?

Pineapple pizza. Apple spice cake too, I guess??

53. favorite foreign food?

Chinese, please and thank you, hit me up with that sweet and sour chicken.

54. are you a clean or messy person?

I try to be clean but depression and lack of energy makes it difficult. But I keep myself as organized as I possibly can and use procrastination to keep stuff as well-put as I can.

55. most used phrased?

I don’t even know.

56. most used word?

I also do not know.

57. how long does it take for you to get ready?

Pft, 7 to 15 minutes to shower on average (depends on if I’m washing my hair or not), fives minutes for face and teeth, five minutes to dress and like three hours to actually get up to get ready. :P

58. do you have much of an ego?

I try very hard not to.

59. do you suck or bite lollipops?

Suck.

60. do you talk to yourself?

I used to when I was younger. Still do sometimes.

61. do you sing to yourself?

I used to and then I realized that a) my self-improvised songs are terrible and b) I can’t sing.

62. are you a good singer?

My mom is deaf. My dad has hearing difficulties. My papa’s singing voice is a wail and my granny’s is shrill sadness.

I was not born into this world a lucky man.

63. biggest fear?

Demon clowns. Dying alone. Being alone forever. Not getting to say the things I want to say to people. That I’ll crash and burn before I graduate or sometime soon after.

64. are you a gossip?

No.

65. best dramatic movie you’ve seen?

I dunno. The most dramatic movies I can remember tend to be war films based on true stories and I normally check out during that kind of stuff because thinking about the horrors of history and the fact that people suffered and died at the hands of people who still objectively exists freaks me out, sends me into a pit of misery until I combust within myself.

66. do you like long or short hair?

No preference for other people, short hair preference for myself. Currently, I’m growing it out so my friend can braid it then I’m gonna chop it back off when I get home in May.

67. can you name all 50 states of america?

If an American can’t do that, then what makes you think me, a Bermudian who’s only concern with the US is how it will affect me and my country and literally was over-relieved when I got dropped from a US history class, would ever know that.

Case in point, I spent most of my childhood assuming New Jersey was a city and only found out it wasn’t last year.

68. favorite school subject?

Accounting.

69. extrovert or introvert?

Introvert.

70. have you ever been scuba diving?

No.

71. what makes you nervous?

Life.

72. are you scared of the dark?

Depends.

73. do you correct people when they make mistakes?

Sometimes. It really depends on the person and the situation.

74. are you ticklish?

Yes.

75. have you ever started a rumor?

No.

76. have you ever been in a position of authority?

No.

77. have you ever drank underage?

Unfortunately, I have? but not anything serious. Just a few sips I didn’t want to take three times throughout my life.

78. have you ever done drugs?

Aside from my prescribed and despite my friends’ best efforts, no.

79. who was your first real crush?

Vanessa Hudgens and whoever that boy who played Freddie from iCarly was.

80. how many piercings do you have?

None.

81. can you roll your rs?“

Yes!

82. how fast can you type?

Who knows??

83. how fast can you run?

I can’t.

84. what color is your hair?

Dark brown with a bunch of purple & pink in it.

85. what color is your eyes?

Brown.

86. what are you allergic to?

Severely allergic to dust mites and extremely irritated by pollen and highly perfumed scents. Which, as far as I’m concerned, means I’m allergic to the damn air.

87. do you keep a journal?

Used to. Don’t anymore.

88. what do your parents do?

My dad is an electrician. He does freelance work for people building houses on-island and my mom is a records management administrator at my bank.

89. do you like your age?

I guess?

90. what makes you angry?

Lots of things. I’m very prone to anger. It’s why the Hulk/Bruce Banner was my favourite superhero as a kid and still is.

91. do you like your own name?

Yes! I do actually really like my name, which sucks because sometimes I get upset or uncomfortable when people refer to me by it and why I like it when people call me Jay, but otherwise my birth name is just beautiful and I don’t think I’d ever be able to give it up.

That being said, I super love the name Jay and when I finally move out of my house and away from Bermuda, I want to try using it more socially rather than just online.

92. have you already thought of baby names, and if so what are they?

I don’t want babies.

93. do you want a boy a girl for a child?

Neither. I want another cat.

94. what are you strengths?

I write well, I can speak well and my pale as fuck skin doesn’t let people realize I’m mixed race so, like my friends point out, I get to skirt around the world, practically invisible and I like to work.

95. what are your weaknesses?

Procrastination, tendency to misery over small mistakes, tendency to blow up small things into large problems, tendency to feel abandoned by people who are not abandoning me, inability to properly fall asleep when I feel a lack of affection and touch in my life, inability to listen to people when they ramble on about things I don’t care about, inability to be upfront with how I feel towards my friends and how I feel they’re treating me, etc, etc, etc.

96. how did you get your name?

With my birthname, my mom picked it out from a book, I think?

With my preferred name,I was reading a book about a trans man called “I Am J” and when I got prompted about my name by a friend online, the name just popped into my head, felt immediately right and I used it and connected to it right away.

97. were your ancestors royalty?

I mean I doubt it but I WILL NEVER KNOW.

My mom is black! My dad is adopted! HOWEVER, FINDING OUT ANY ANYTHING ABOUT HER ANCESTRY IS MY MOM’S NUMBER ONE GOAL AND BELIEVE ME, ONCE SHE LEARNS THAT, I WILL LET Y’ALL KNOW.

98. do you have any scars?

Hasn’t this already been asked?

99. color of your bedspread?

Blue and white.

100. color of your room?

Dull green.

#yuuidankkuma #happy's asks #I WAS HOPING U WOULDN'T BC U WERE ON MOBILE AND SINCE I CAN'T FIND WHERE TO ASK PPL Q'S ON MOBILE #I WAS HOPING THAT THERE WAS NOT AN OPTION #U COULD LEGIT JUST SEND A RANDOM NUmBER BABE #THIS TOOK FOREVER #UR LUCKY I LIKE U

3 notes · View notes

beardcore-blog · 4 years

Text

A Princess Diary

"What’s Wrong With Cinderella?"

I finally came unhinged in the dentist’s office — one of those ritzy pediatric practices tricked out with comic books, DVDs and arcade games — where I’d taken my 3-year-old daughter for her first exam. Until then, I’d held my tongue. I’d smiled politely every time the supermarket-checkout clerk greeted her with ”Hi, Princess”; ignored the waitress at our local breakfast joint who called the funny-face pancakes she ordered her ”princess meal”; made no comment when the lady at Longs Drugs said, ”I bet I know your favorite color” and handed her a pink balloon rather than letting her choose for herself. Maybe it was the dentist’s Betty Boop inflection that got to me, but when she pointed to the exam chair and said, ”Would you like to sit in my special princess throne so I can sparkle your teeth?” I lost it.

”Oh, for God’s sake,” I snapped. ”Do you have a princess drill, too?”

She stared at me as if I were an evil stepmother.

”Come on!” I continued, my voice rising. ”It’s 2006, not 1950. This is Berkeley, Calif. Does every little girl really have to be a princess?”

My daughter, who was reaching for a Cinderella sticker, looked back and forth between us. ”Why are you so mad, Mama?” she asked. ”What’s wrong with princesses?”

Diana may be dead and Masako disgraced, but here in America, we are in the midst of a royal moment. To call princesses a ”trend” among girls is like calling Harry Potter a book. Sales at Disney Consumer Products, which started the craze six years ago by packaging nine of its female characters under one royal rubric, have shot up to $3 billion, globally, this year, from $300 million in 2001. There are now more than 25,000 Disney Princess items. ”Princess,” as some Disney execs call it, is not only the fastest-growing brand the company has ever created; they say it is on its way to becoming the largest girls’ franchise on the planet.

Meanwhile in 2001, Mattel brought out its own ”world of girl” line of princess Barbie dolls, DVDs, toys, clothing, home décor and myriad other products. At a time when Barbie sales were declining domestically, they became instant best sellers. Shortly before that, Mary Drolet, a Chicago-area mother and former Claire’s and Montgomery Ward executive, opened Club Libby Lu, now a chain of mall stores based largely in the suburbs in which girls ages 4 to 12 can shop for ”Princess Phones” covered in faux fur and attend ”Princess-Makeover Birthday Parties.” Saks bought Club Libby Lu in 2003 for $12 million and has since expanded it to 87 outlets; by 2005, with only scant local advertising, revenues hovered around the $46 million mark, a 53 percent jump from the previous year. Pink, it seems, is the new gold.

Even Dora the Explorer, the intrepid, dirty-kneed adventurer, has ascended to the throne: in 2004, after a two-part episode in which she turns into a ”true princess,” the Nickelodeon and Viacom consumer-products division released a satin-gowned ”Magic Hair Fairytale Dora,” with hair that grows or shortens when her crown is touched. Among other phrases the bilingual doll utters: ”Vámonos! Let’s go to fairy-tale land!” and ”Will you brush my hair?”

As a feminist mother — not to mention a nostalgic product of the Grranimals era — I have been taken by surprise by the princess craze and the girlie-girl culture that has risen around it. What happened to William wanting a doll and not dressing your cat in an apron? Whither Marlo Thomas? I watch my fellow mothers, women who once swore they’d never be dependent on a man, smile indulgently at daughters who warble ”So This Is Love” or insist on being called Snow White. I wonder if they’d concede so readily to sons who begged for combat fatigues and mock AK-47s.

More to the point, when my own girl makes her daily beeline for the dress-up corner of her preschool classroom — something I’m convinced she does largely to torture me — I worry about what playing Little Mermaid is teaching her. I’ve spent much of my career writing about experiences that undermine girls’ well-being, warning parents that a preoccupation with body and beauty (encouraged by films, TV, magazines and, yes, toys) is perilous to their daughters’ mental and physical health. Am I now supposed to shrug and forget all that? If trafficking in stereotypes doesn’t matter at 3, when does it matter? At 6? Eight? Thirteen?

On the other hand, maybe I’m still surfing a washed-out second wave of feminism in a third-wave world. Maybe princesses are in fact a sign of progress, an indication that girls can embrace their predilection for pink without compromising strength or ambition; that, at long last, they can ”have it all.” Or maybe it is even less complex than that: to mangle Freud, maybe a princess is sometimes just a princess. And, as my daughter wants to know, what’s wrong with that?

The rise of the Disney princesses reads like a fairy tale itself, with Andy Mooney, a former Nike executive, playing the part of prince, riding into the company on a metaphoric white horse in January 2000 to save a consumer-products division whose sales were dropping by as much as 30 percent a year. Both overstretched and underfocused, the division had triggered price wars by granting multiple licenses for core products (say, Winnie-the-Pooh undies) while ignoring the potential of new media. What’s more, Disney films like ”A Bug’s Life” in 1998 had yielded few merchandising opportunities — what child wants to snuggle up with an ant?

It was about a month after Mooney’s arrival that the magic struck. That’s when he flew to Phoenix to check out his first ”Disney on Ice” show. ”Standing in line in the arena, I was surrounded by little girls dressed head to toe as princesses,” he told me last summer in his palatial office, then located in Burbank, and speaking in a rolling Scottish burr. ”They weren’t even Disney products. They were generic princess products they’d appended to a Halloween costume. And the light bulb went off. Clearly there was latent demand here. So the next morning I said to my team, ‘O.K., let’s establish standards and a color palette and talk to licensees and get as much product out there as we possibly can that allows these girls to do what they’re doing anyway: projecting themselves into the characters from the classic movies.’ ”

Mooney picked a mix of old and new heroines to wear the Pantone pink No. 241 corona: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan and Pocahontas. It was the first time Disney marketed characters separately from a film’s release, let alone lumped together those from different stories. To ensure the sanctity of what Mooney called their individual ”mythologies,” the princesses never make eye contact when they’re grouped: each stares off in a slightly different direction as if unaware of the others’ presence.

It is also worth noting that not all of the ladies are of royal extraction. Part of the genius of ”Princess” is that its meaning is so broadly constructed that it actually has no meaning. Even Tinker Bell was originally a Princess, though her reign didn’t last. ”We’d always debate over whether she was really a part of the Princess mythology,” Mooney recalled. ”She really wasn’t.” Likewise, Mulan and Pocahontas, arguably the most resourceful of the bunch, are rarely depicted on Princess merchandise, though for a different reason. Their rustic garb has less bling potential than that of old-school heroines like Sleeping Beauty. (When Mulan does appear, she is typically in the kimonolike hanfu, which makes her miserable in the movie, rather than her liberated warrior’s gear.)

The first Princess items, released with no marketing plan, no focus groups, no advertising, sold as if blessed by a fairy godmother. To this day, Disney conducts little market research on the Princess line, relying instead on the power of its legacy among mothers as well as the instant-read sales barometer of the theme parks and Disney Stores. ”We simply gave girls what they wanted,” Mooney said of the line’s success, ”although I don’t think any of us grasped how much they wanted this. I wish I could sit here and take credit for having some grand scheme to develop this, but all we did was envision a little girl’s room and think about how she could live out the princess fantasy. The counsel we gave to licensees was: What type of bedding would a princess want to sleep in? What kind of alarm clock would a princess want to wake up to? What type of television would a princess like to see? It’s a rare case where you find a girl who has every aspect of her room bedecked in Princess, but if she ends up with three or four of these items, well, then you have a very healthy business.”

Every reporter Mooney talks to asks some version of my next question: Aren’t the Princesses, who are interested only in clothes, jewelry and cadging the handsome prince, somewhat retrograde role models?

”Look,” he said, ”I have friends whose son went through the Power Rangers phase who castigated themselves over what they must’ve done wrong. Then they talked to other parents whose kids had gone through it. The boy passes through. The girl passes through. I see girls expanding their imagination through visualizing themselves as princesses, and then they pass through that phase and end up becoming lawyers, doctors, mothers or princesses, whatever the case may be.”

Mooney has a point: There are no studies proving that playing princess directly damages girls’ self-esteem or dampens other aspirations. On the other hand, there is evidence that young women who hold the most conventionally feminine beliefs — who avoid conflict and think they should be perpetually nice and pretty — are more likely to be depressed than others and less likely to use contraception. What’s more, the 23 percent decline in girls’ participation in sports and other vigorous activity between middle and high school has been linked to their sense that athletics is unfeminine. And in a survey released last October by Girls Inc., school-age girls overwhelmingly reported a paralyzing pressure to be ”perfect”: not only to get straight A’s and be the student-body president, editor of the newspaper and captain of the swim team but also to be ”kind and caring,” ”please everyone, be very thin and dress right.” Give those girls a pumpkin and a glass slipper and they’d be in business.

At the grocery store one day, my daughter noticed a little girl sporting a Cinderella backpack. ”There’s that princess you don’t like, Mama!” she shouted.

”Um, yeah,” I said, trying not to meet the other mother’s hostile gaze.

”Don’t you like her blue dress, Mama?”

I had to admit, I did.

She thought about this. ”Then don’t you like her face?”

”Her face is all right,” I said, noncommittally, though I’m not thrilled to have my Japanese-Jewish child in thrall to those Aryan features. (And what the heck are those blue things covering her ears?) ”It’s just, honey, Cinderella doesn’t really do anything.”

Over the next 45 minutes, we ran through that conversation, verbatim, approximately 37 million times, as my daughter pointed out Disney Princess Band-Aids, Disney Princess paper cups, Disney Princess lip balm, Disney Princess pens, Disney Princess crayons and Disney Princess notebooks — all cleverly displayed at the eye level of a 3-year-old trapped in a shopping cart — as well as a bouquet of Disney Princess balloons bobbing over the checkout line. The repetition was excessive, even for a preschooler. What was it about my answers that confounded her? What if, instead of realizing: Aha! Cinderella is a symbol of the patriarchal oppression of all women, another example of corporate mind control and power-to-the-people! my 3-year-old was thinking, Mommy doesn’t want me to be a girl?

According to theories of gender constancy, until they’re about 6 or 7, children don’t realize that the sex they were born with is immutable. They believe that they have a choice: they can grow up to be either a mommy or a daddy. Some psychologists say that until permanency sets in kids embrace whatever stereotypes our culture presents, whether it’s piling on the most spangles or attacking one another with light sabers. What better way to assure that they’ll always remain themselves? If that’s the case, score one for Mooney. By not buying the Princess Pull-Ups, I may be inadvertently communicating that being female (to the extent that my daughter is able to understand it) is a bad thing.

Anyway, you have to give girls some credit. It’s true that, according to Mattel, one of the most popular games young girls play is ”bride,” but Disney found that a groom or prince is incidental to that fantasy, a regrettable necessity at best. Although they keep him around for the climactic kiss, he is otherwise relegated to the bottom of the toy box, which is why you don’t see him prominently displayed in stores.

What’s more, just because they wear the tulle doesn’t mean they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. Plenty of girls stray from the script, say, by playing basketball in their finery, or casting themselves as the powerful evil stepsister bossing around the sniveling Cinderella. I recall a headline-grabbing 2005 British study that revealed that girls enjoy torturing, decapitating and microwaving their Barbies nearly as much as they like to dress them up for dates. There is spice along with that sugar after all, though why this was news is beyond me: anyone who ever played with the doll knows there’s nothing more satisfying than hacking off all her hair and holding her underwater in the bathtub. Princesses can even be a boon to exasperated parents: in our house, for instance, royalty never whines and uses the potty every single time.

”Playing princess is not the issue,” argues Lyn Mikel Brown, an author, with Sharon Lamb, of ”Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers’ Schemes.” ”The issue is 25,000 Princess products,” says Brown, a professor of education and human development at Colby College. ”When one thing is so dominant, then it’s no longer a choice: it’s a mandate, cannibalizing all other forms of play. There’s the illusion of more choices out there for girls, but if you look around, you’ll see their choices are steadily narrowing.”

It’s hard to imagine that girls’ options could truly be shrinking when they dominate the honor roll and outnumber boys in college. Then again, have you taken a stroll through a children’s store lately? A year ago, when we shopped for ”big girl” bedding at Pottery Barn Kids, we found the ”girls” side awash in flowers, hearts and hula dancers; not a soccer player or sailboat in sight. Across the no-fly zone, the ”boys” territory was all about sports, trains, planes and automobiles. Meanwhile, Baby GAP’s boys’ onesies were emblazoned with ”Big Man on Campus” and the girls’ with ”Social Butterfly”; guess whose matching shoes were decorated on the soles with hearts and whose sported a ”No. 1” logo? And at Toys ”R” Us, aisles of pink baby dolls, kitchens, shopping carts and princesses unfurl a safe distance from the ”Star Wars” figures, GeoTrax and tool chests. The relentless resegregation of childhood appears to have sneaked up without any further discussion about sex roles, about what it now means to be a boy or to be a girl. Or maybe it has happened in lieu of such discussion because it’s easier this way.

Easier, that is, unless you want to buy your daughter something that isn’t pink. Girls’ obsession with that color may seem like something they’re born with, like the ability to breathe or talk on the phone for hours on end. But according to Jo Paoletti, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, it ain’t so. When colors were first introduced to the nursery in the early part of the 20th century, pink was considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, was thought to be dainty. Why or when that switched is not clear, but as late as the 1930s a significant percentage of adults in one national survey held to that split. Perhaps that’s why so many early Disney heroines — Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Wendy, Alice-in-Wonderland — are swathed in varying shades of azure. (Purple, incidentally, may be the next color to swap teams: once the realm of kings and N.F.L. players, it is fast becoming the bolder girl’s version of pink.)

It wasn’t until the mid-1980s, when amplifying age and sex differences became a key strategy of children’s marketing (recall the emergence of ” ‘tween”), that pink became seemingly innate to girls, part of what defined them as female, at least for the first few years. That was also the time that the first of the generation raised during the unisex phase of feminism — ah, hither Marlo! — became parents. ”The kids who grew up in the 1970s wanted sharp definitions for their own kids,” Paoletti told me. ”I can understand that, because the unisex thing denied everything — you couldn’t be this, you couldn’t be that, you had to be a neutral nothing.”

The infatuation with the girlie girl certainly could, at least in part, be a reaction against the so-called second wave of the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s (the first wave was the fight for suffrage), which fought for reproductive rights and economic, social and legal equality. If nothing else, pink and Princess have resuscitated the fantasy of romance that that era of feminism threatened, the privileges that traditional femininity conferred on women despite its costs — doors magically opened, dinner checks picked up, Manolo Blahniks. Frippery. Fun. Why should we give up the perks of our sex until we’re sure of what we’ll get in exchange? Why should we give them up at all? Or maybe it’s deeper than that: the freedoms feminism bestowed came with an undercurrent of fear among women themselves — flowing through ”Ally McBeal,” ”Bridget Jones’s Diary,” ”Sex and the City” — of losing male love, of never marrying, of not having children, of being deprived of something that felt essentially and exclusively female.

I mulled that over while flipping through ”The Paper Bag Princess,” a 1980 picture book hailed as an antidote to Disney. The heroine outwits a dragon who has kidnapped her prince, but not before the beast’s fiery breath frizzles her hair and destroys her dress, forcing her to don a paper bag. The ungrateful prince rejects her, telling her to come back when she is ”dressed like a real princess.” She dumps him and skips off into the sunset, happily ever after, alone.

There you have it, ”Thelma and Louise” all over again. Step out of line, and you end up solo or, worse, sailing crazily over a cliff to your doom. Alternatives like those might send you skittering right back to the castle. And I get that: the fact is, though I want my daughter to do and be whatever she wants as an adult, I still hope she’ll find her Prince Charming and have babies, just as I have. I don’t want her to be a fish without a bicycle; I want her to be a fish with another fish. Preferably, one who loves and respects her and also does the dishes and half the child care.

There had to be a middle ground between compliant and defiant, between petticoats and paper bags. I remembered a video on YouTube, an ad for a Nintendo game called Super Princess Peach. It showed a pack of girls in tiaras, gowns and elbow-length white gloves sliding down a zip line on parasols, navigating an obstacle course of tires in their stilettos, slithering on their bellies under barbed wire, then using their telekinetic powers to make a climbing wall burst into flames. ”If you can stand up to really mean people,” an announcer intoned, ”maybe you have what it takes to be a princess.”

Now here were some girls who had grit as well as grace. I loved Princess Peach even as I recognized that there was no way she could run in those heels, that her peachiness did nothing to upset the apple cart of expectation: she may have been athletic, smart and strong, but she was also adorable. Maybe she’s what those once-unisex, postfeminist parents are shooting for: the melding of old and new standards. And perhaps that’s a good thing, the ideal solution. But what to make, then, of the young women in the Girls Inc. survey? It doesn’t seem to be ”having it all” that’s getting to them; it’s the pressure to be it all. In telling our girls they can be anything, we have inadvertently demanded that they be everything. To everyone. All the time. No wonder the report was titled ”The Supergirl Dilemma.”

The princess as superhero is not irrelevant. Some scholars I spoke with say that given its post-9/11 timing, princess mania is a response to a newly dangerous world. ”Historically, princess worship has emerged during periods of uncertainty and profound social change,” observes Miriam Forman-Brunell, a historian at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Francis Hodgson Burnett’s original”Little Princess” was published at a time of rapid urbanization, immigration and poverty; Shirley Temple’s film version was a hit during the Great Depression. ”The original folk tales themselves,” Forman-Brunell says, ”spring from medieval and early modern European culture that faced all kinds of economic and demographic and social upheaval — famine, war, disease, terror of wolves. Girls play savior during times of economic crisis and instability.” That’s a heavy burden for little shoulders. Perhaps that’s why the magic wand has become an essential part of the princess get-up. In the original stories — even the Disney versions of them — it’s not the girl herself who’s magic; it’s the fairy godmother. Now if Forman-Brunell is right, we adults have become the cursed creatures whom girls have the thaumaturgic power to transform.

In the 1990s, third-wave feminists rebelled against their dour big sisters, ”reclaiming” sexual objectification as a woman’s right — provided, of course, that it was on her own terms, that she was the one choosing to strip or wear a shirt that said ”Porn Star” or make out with her best friend at a frat-house bash. They embraced words like ”bitch” and ”slut” as terms of affection and empowerment. That is, when used by the right people, with the right dash of playful irony. But how can you assure that? As Madonna gave way to Britney, whatever self-determination that message contained was watered down and commodified until all that was left was a gaggle of 6-year-old girls in belly-baring T-shirts (which I’m guessing they don’t wear as cultural critique). It is no wonder that parents, faced with thongs for 8-year-olds and Bratz dolls’ ”passion for fashion,” fill their daughters’ closets with pink sateen; the innocence of Princess feels like a reprieve.

”But what does that mean?” asks Sharon Lamb, a psychology professor at Saint Michael’s College. ”There are other ways to express ‘innocence’ — girls could play ladybug or caterpillar. What you’re really talking about is sexual purity. And there’s a trap at the end of that rainbow, because the natural progression from pale, innocent pink is not to other colors. It’s to hot, sexy pink — exactly the kind of sexualization parents are trying to avoid.”

Lamb suggested that to see for myself how ”Someday My Prince Will Come” morphs into ”Oops! I Did It Again,” I visit Club Libby Lu, the mall shop dedicated to the ”Very Important Princess.”

Walking into one of the newest links in the store’s chain, in Natick, Mass., last summer, I had to tip my tiara to the founder, Mary Drolet: Libby Lu’s design was flawless. Unlike Disney, Drolet depended on focus groups to choose the logo (a crown-topped heart) and the colors (pink, pink, purple and more pink). The displays were scaled to the size of a 10-year-old, though most of the shoppers I saw were several years younger than that. The decals on the walls and dressing rooms — ”I Love Your Hair,” ”Hip Chick,” ”Spoiled” — were written in ”girlfriend language.” The young sales clerks at this ”special secret club for superfabulous girls” are called ”club counselors” and come off like your coolest baby sitter, the one who used to let you brush her hair. The malls themselves are chosen based on a company formula called the G.P.I., or ”Girl Power Index,” which predicts potential sales revenues. Talk about newspeak: ”Girl Power” has gone from a riot grrrrl anthem to ”I Am Woman, Watch Me Shop.”

Inside, the store was divided into several glittery ”shopping zones” called ”experiences”: Libby’s Laboratory, now called Sparkle Spa, where girls concoct their own cosmetics and bath products; Libby’s Room; Ear Piercing; Pooch Parlor (where divas in training can pamper stuffed poodles, pugs and Chihuahuas); and the Style Studio, offering ”Libby Du” makeover choices, including ‘Tween Idol, Rock Star, Pop Star and, of course, Priceless Princess. Each look includes hairstyle, makeup, nail polish and sparkly tattoos.

As I browsed, I noticed a mother standing in the center of the store holding a price list for makeover birthday parties — $22.50 to $35 per child. Her name was Anne McAuliffe; her daughters — Stephanie, 4, and 7-year-old twins Rory and Sarah — were dashing giddily up and down the aisles.

”They’ve been begging to come to this store for three weeks,” McAuliffe said. ”I’d never heard of it. So I said they could, but they’d have to spend their own money if they bought anything.” She looked around. ”Some of this stuff is innocuous,” she observed, then leaned toward me, eyes wide and stage-whispered: ”But … a lot of it is horrible. It makes them look like little prostitutes. It’s crazy. They’re babies!”

As we debated the line between frivolous fun and JonBenét, McAuliffe’s daughter Rory came dashing up, pigtails haphazard, glasses askew. ”They have the best pocketbooks here,” she said breathlessly, brandishing a clutch with the words ”Girlie Girl” stamped on it. ”Please, can I have one? It has sequins!”

”You see that?” McAuliffe asked, gesturing at the bag. ”What am I supposed to say?”

On my way out of the mall, I popped into the ” ‘tween” mecca Hot Topic, where a display of Tinker Bell items caught my eye. Tinker Bell, whose image racks up an annual $400 million in retail sales with no particular effort on Disney’s part, is poised to wreak vengeance on the Princess line that once expelled her. Last winter, the first chapter book designed to introduce girls to Tink and her Pixie Hollow pals spent 18 weeks on The New York Times children’s best-seller list. In a direct-to-DVD now under production, she will speak for the first time, voiced by the actress Brittany Murphy. Next year, Disney Fairies will be rolled out in earnest. Aimed at 6- to 9-year-old girls, the line will catch them just as they outgrow Princess. Their colors will be lavender, green, turquoise — anything but the Princess’s soon-to-be-babyish pink.

To appeal to that older child, Disney executives said, the Fairies will have more ”attitude” and ”sass” than the Princesses. What, I wondered, did that entail? I’d seen some of the Tinker Bell merchandise that Disney sells at its theme parks: T-shirts reading, ”Spoiled to Perfection,” ”Mood Subject to Change Without Notice” and ”Tinker Bell: Prettier Than a Princess.” At Hot Topic, that edge was even sharper: magnets, clocks, light-switch plates and panties featured ”Dark Tink,” described as ”the bad girl side of Miss Bell that Walt never saw.”

Girl power, indeed.

A few days later, I picked my daughter up from preschool. She came tearing over in a full-skirted frock with a gold bodice, a beaded crown perched sideways on her head. ”Look, Mommy, I’m Ariel!” she crowed. referring to Disney’s Little Mermaid. Then she stopped and furrowed her brow. ”Mommy, do you like Ariel?”

I considered her for a moment. Maybe Princess is the first salvo in what will become a lifelong struggle over her body image, a Hundred Years’ War of dieting, plucking, painting and perpetual dissatisfaction with the results. Or maybe it isn’t. I’ll never really know. In the end, it’s not the Princesses that really bother me anyway. They’re just a trigger for the bigger question of how, over the years, I can help my daughter with the contradictions she will inevitably face as a girl, the dissonance that is as endemic as ever to growing up female. Maybe the best I can hope for is that her generation will get a little further with the solutions than we did.

For now, I kneeled down on the floor and gave my daughter a hug.

She smiled happily. ”But, Mommy?” she added. ”When I grow up, I’m still going to be a fireman.”

– by Peggy Orenstein, for the New York Times Magazine (December 2006)

Posted by lukewho on 2007-01-01 19:50:52

Tagged: , fremont , christmas , 2006 , jacinto , princess , disney

The post A Princess Diary appeared first on Good Info.

0 notes

pastelgrungewrecker · 7 years

Text

Dear Papa Bear,

It’s the twenty fifth of July, in the year 2017.

And I’m writing to the person you were back in 1994. Or maybe I’m writing to the you I left behind in Ohio, with something cold settling where my feet sat in heels that never did fit me right.

I don’t know. Both of them are strangers to me.

I want to see the you I remember, again. The man who wore a donkey kong tshirt, and drank his coffee after forgetting about it for hours while he played crash bandicoot.

The one who let me sit in his lap and drink my kool aid. Who let kate the cat sit with us, even if she was a weird looking stuffed animal.

I miss him every day, you know that? Sometimes I look for him in the photo albums, and i find him. And i miss him even more.

He used to hold my hand, when we walked to the park. Dennis the Menace park, remember? It was near where we lived on base. And he’d kiss the owwies after washing them with cold water from the fountain, and taught me how to rollerblade.

He used to tell me that I could be in the X Games. That dreaming was doing.

I miss him.

I used to fall asleep against him, and trace the bauhaus tattoo on his arm. And I’d ask him what it meant.

And he’d tell me it meant he was still learning. he was still figuring out who he was, and that that was okay.

He’d watch me write, and he’d cheer when I showed him the stories little girls make up in the summer sun.

Sometimes he yelled at me, it happens. He only yelled when he was scared, when I could be hurt. When i was in danger. And he’d scoop me up when I cried so hard my chest hurt, and when my ears leaked blood because genetics was a cruel mistress. And he put warm rags on my neck when it was so swollen I couldn’t swallow. couldn’t breathe.

He made sure to get chocolate chip ice cream after I got out of surgery.

but... daddy, he went away. I don’t know why he went away. I was a good girl. I was a winner. I brought home awards.

Who are you?

Who did you become?

Why?

It’s... easier to joke about now. It’s easier to laugh about your “punishments” for “dirty girls”. Easy to laugh about cleaning house while you drank yourself into a case of Miller Lite. Sometimes I can even sleep with the closet door open.

It’s easy to laugh at my loose sleeping habits. To chuckle at the kinds of guys and girls I went for, wooed, slept with, and left behind- Easy to cackle when I remember them crying.

It’s easier to use my nightmares as a punchline. To remember the day you ripped apart my notebooks and scattered them everywhere.

To remember my rings, sliced into peices with the cutter in your garage- do you remember that? You found out they were men’s rings, remember? Thick and bulky and out of place on hands as small as mine. But they were warm, warm when my hands were numb from whatever was in my system. I wore them on my thumb, and my middle finger. I switched them, when I was able to smoke more freely.

Hands that played piano for you at little recitals, playing Beethoven and Bach. Hands that played whatever song was stuck in my head, to your neverending delight.

Stained by nicotine now. It never comes off.

My writer’s callous, on my right hand. The one you told me to get rid of... That I tried to file off in your bathroom, gritting my teeth because I refused to cry no matter how much my finger bled.

It didn’t work. You were angry that the file broke.

They told you I wasn’t well. When I was in high school. Mom was drunk, so drunk, and she called you on the phone and said “She has depression. PTSD. They think it’s from our divorce. You better help fix her.”

You told me the medicine was poison. That it would make me ugly, and bad.

You told me I wasn’t... sexy.

You told me I looked like a man.

“Kevin, she has PCOS. They said her body is producing testosterone in amounts that warp things.”

You laughed and flicked my throat, saying I looked like I had an Adam’s Apple. You put your hands on my shoulders and pushed down.

Tuck these in, sweet pea, be girly. be pretty. Be right.

I never fit in this.... body. I told you that. I never felt like a Girl. I wasn’t a girl, not really. Not in my head, not in my heart, not in anything. I wasn’t a boy either, stop calling me those words.

Men’s clothes fit me, they have more room for a body that wasn’t one or the other.

I told you so many truths. I told you so many things. I wanted to be real to you again. A person.

Maybe, if I reminded you I was here, and hurting... You’d come back.

There’s still a crying kid inside of me. They wipe their nose on their sleeve, they scream for you to come get them. To kiss those scraped knees and help them tighten those rollerblades so we can go down the hill so fast we fly.

Little me still doesn’t understand. Doesn’t know why you and Mom couldn’t just love each other. Couldn’t work things out. Why we couldn’t be a family anymore.

I watch her, from the age of twenty five chainsmoking Marlboros with scars covering me from head to toe. After ripping the hair out of my chin, of my upper lip, after washing my face and checking to make sure the lump of my throat doesn’t protrude too much. After making sure my eyebrows aren’t too thick, and humming high to make sure my voice doesn’t drop low again.

Sometimes people on the phone mistake me for you.

Sometimes, they think I’m mom’s new boyfriend they haven’t met. Even though she hasn’t dated anyone since I made jeremiah cry with my sleep rough voice and bitter words.

I’m on a hundred milligrams now. They give me trazodone to sleep- they wanted to give me tramadol, but I begged them not to give me a narcotic. Please.

I’ve been so many different people. And none of them were good enough. And you, and mom... You never told me who I was supposed to be.

Hearing my old nicknames is so jarring. Hearing my full name makes my teeth grind and hearing anyone say I Love You fills me with such cold fear that it burns my throat.

I’m in love, again. They don’t remind me of you at all.

I miss you.

Sincerely,

Pooh Bear.

#do not reboob please #venting #fathers #abuse mention #referenced csa

3 notes · View notes

miyacchis · 7 years

Text

Kis-My-Ft2 2017.04-2018.3 Calendar 700 Questions 700 Answers Book: Special Interviews & Backstage Shots - Miyata Toshiya Excerpt

1. What’s a danger you’ve encountered on vacation?

A few years ago, when I went to Izu with a friend, I was hit with stomach pain, while we were stuck in traffic. Cars weren’t moving at all, but I had to wait all covered in sweat until we could make it to a parking area. I barely made it.

2. Have you ever fallen in love with a girl at first sight?

I...guess so, yeah.

3. Do you prefer udon or soba?

Udon.

4. Do you have any reoccurring dreams?

I’ve had this scary dream since I was kid where there are these tetris-like blocks falling on me, and I have to keep climbing up to avoid them. For some reason, if I make it to the top, there’s always a motorsports promo model, holding a parasol, waiting there.

5. What’s something you’ve felt gap-moe over?

I think it’s cute when someone who is kind of strong and aggressive goes shopping with their mom.

6. What’s a moment when you’ve felt on top of the world?

Once I went to this izakaya where the food was free if you could stop a stopwatch exactly at ten seconds, so we ended up getting everything for free. I wish I had ordered more.

7. What do you do to cheer yourself up if you’re feeling down?

I imagine myself as a happy old man. Like, a house with a garden, and me playing around with my dog. I can convince myself to work hard now for that version of myself in the future.

8. Where’s a place that you can feel at ease?

My house.

9. What are you doing to care for your health or to train your body?

Going to the gym. I’m trying to build up my chest and arms.

10. How many hours do you sleep ideally?

About eight hours.

11. When you sleep do you prefer keeping the lights on or turning them off?

I don’t really care either way. I guess I turn them off.

12. What do you wash first when you get in the bath?

My head.

13. What do you like to use on your eggs?

Soy sauce.

14. When you go on a trip, do you pack light or heavy?

I think I pack lightly, but if I look at everyone in Kisumai, I guess it’s not that light.

15. What do you always take on a trip?

My tablet.

16. Which do you like, ponytails or pigtails?

Pigtails. Although, ponytails are cute too!

17. Do you put the bills in your wallet the same direction?

I don’t pay attention to that, so they probably aren’t lined up.

18. Do you like going to tropical islands?

Not really, but if I were to go, I’m sure I could enjoy it.

19. What’s the best vacation you’ve been on?

Coming to Amami Oshima for this year’s calendar photo shoot. It’s never this relaxed. No matter where we go for work, we’re always running around really busy.

20. What’s your favorite season?

Fall because it’s cool.

21. Where have you been on vacation this year?

I went to Kyoto for filming, and whenever I had time, I went sightseeing by myself and even bought souvenirs. I bought some delicious thing from Kyoto for myself to snack on at home, and I bought some good bread for my mom.

22. What’s something you got excited about this year?

Higashiyama Noriyuki taking me out to dinner. I was nervous, but I’m glad I was able to hear a lot of different stories from him.

23. What’s the best thing you bought this year?

The OVA (original video animation) of a creator that I like.

24. Tell me about your schedule on off days.

I wake up around ten, adn then I kind of lazily watch anime until it’s dark. When I get hungry, I eat.

25. What are your top five favorite foods?

1. Yakiniku. 2. Shabu shabu. 3. Mongolian mutton barbecue (Genghis Khan). 4. Fried horse mackerel. 5. Bread.

26. What are your top three favorite movies?

1. The Garden of Words. 2. Jersey Boys. 3. Kizumonogatari.

27. Tell me three of your favorite animals.

Miniature Dachshund, Toy Poodle, and Maltese. My family has a Mini Dachshund.

28. What’s your favorite book?

I seriously love Hunter X Hunter. I read it a lot.

29. What’s your favorite color?

White. My house is overall white too.

30. What do you like about yourself?

Appearance-wise, I like my hair. I often go to the hair salon, and I use good shampoo, so I invest a lot of money in it. I want my hair to be silky soft. I also like that I can eat a lot.

31. What do you hate about yourself?

I’m restless. If we’re talking about appearance, I don’t like that I have extra bulk.

32. What reminds you of your mother’s cooking?

Napolitan.

33. What do you wear to bed?

Pajamas.

34. What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?

Drink water.

35. What’s something you treasure?

The HD in my house because I have a lot of things I’m thinking of watching recorded on it.

36. How do you de-stress?

Lately I’m into muscle training.

37. If you were something other than an idol, what would you want to be?

A blogger.

38. What’s your favorite scent?

The smell of soap.

39. Do you have a special skill?

I can eat samgyeopsal neatly.

40. What do you like to drink?

Black coffee.

41. What’s something you want right now?

A washing machine. I want to buy a new one.

42. Where do you feel the most relaxed in your house?

My sofa.

43. What makes you excited?

When someone invites me for food.

44. What makes you feel down?

When I’m made fun of.

45. When was the last time you cried?

When I was watching Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans recently.

46. What do you always carry in your bag?

A charger.

47. When do you feel like you’ve been an idiot?

When I get excited so easily, like when other people are sleeping and I’m making a bunch of noise.

48. What is your favorite view or scenery?

Green places in the middle of the city, like Yoyogi Park or Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden.

49. As a man, what’s something you hold dear?

My chest muscles.

50. What’s something about yourself you find weak*?

I tend to dwell on unpleasant things.

51. What kind of weather do you like?

Cloudy weather because, when it’s bright outside, the rays can hurt.

52. What’s a part of the city that you like?

Akihabara.

53. What’s your favorite form of transportation?

Cars.

54. What’s your favorite number?

Seven.

55. What’s your favorite kind of sushi?

Horse Mackerel.

56. What’s your favorite rice ball filling?

Seasoned cod roe.

57. What food makes you excited when you see it at work?

Something fashionable that I’ve never seen before.

58. What’s your favorite female fashion?

I like knit hats.

59. Do you prefer someone you’re dating to be older, younger, or the same age as you?

Anything is okay. If I had to answer, the same age.

60. What’s your type?

Someone who smiles a lot.

61. What’s a habit that you find feminine?

Carrying a pouch.

62. What’s something you require in the woman you marry?

Someone who will change me. I feel like I’ll turn in a husband who doesn’t like to do anything ro go out of the house, so I want someone who’s confident they can make me into a good husband.

63. What kind of benefits come with dating you?

You can raise me into the person you want. You can change me as you like.

64. Do you think marriage and love are different?

I’ve never really thought about it. I do hear it’s different though.

65. What is one thing you would bring to a deserted island?

A radio. I’d like to experience being able to get to the right frequency and picking up sound. It’s romantic.

66. What’s something you try to keep in mind when you’re at work?

Having fun and messing around aren’t the same thing.

67. Who are you close with among your senpai, kohai, and douki (someone who joined Johnny’s at the same time)?

For senpai, (A.B.C-Z’s) Tsuka-chan (Tsukada Ryoichi). For kohai, (Johnny’s Junior) Sakuma Daisuke. There are more, but if I were just to give a couple...

68. What is something people misunderstand about you?

I actually get depressed quite easily. Even if someone only intends to tease me, I find it more painful than other people might.

69. Tell me a secret of yours.

I like hte pain when I cute my nails a bit too short.

70. Do you have a best friend?

I do, I have friends who I’ve been with from kindergarten to middle school. There are about five of us, and we go out together a lot.

71. If you were to redo your life, where would you go back to?

I don’t feel like I’ve ever really made a mistake like that...If I had to answer, I think after debut I did too many weird things. I wish I had been a little more Johnny’s-like and tried to be cooler. It’s too late now (lol).

72. What would you title your life?

“Doing what you like as much as you like.”

73. If you had a million yen to spend in a day, what would you do?

I would go to a high-class restaurant, put the money on the table, and say, “Keep the change.”

74. Say something to 100-year-old you!

It’s amazing you’ve lived this long.

75. What would you do if the world was going to end in one week?

I’d stay at home. At the last moment, I would do a toast with my best friend and a glass of highball.

76. What’s something small that’s worrying you right now?

I’ve been eating too much lately.

77. What would you do if you could use magic?

I would give myself a six-pack.

78. With 100 being a perfect score, how would you rate your life?

About 15 points, I guess. I still haven’t become who I thought I would be at 28 at all.

79. What’s the best compliment you can receive?

“Have you lost weight?”

80. What clothes suit you?

Generally, there aren’t really any clothes that look good on me. A suit, I guess.

81. Dogs or cats?

Dogs.

82. What do you tend to do when you have free time?

I play games on my phone.

83. Do you believe in ghosts?

I don’t.

84. Do you believe in astrology?

I don’t.

85. The ocean or the mountains?

The ocean. The mountains are too dangerous. As long as you don’t go into the ocean, it’s fine.

86. Who are your fans to you?

My precious girlfriends.

87. What are you crazy about right now?

Body building.

88. Who is your rival?

(A.B.C-Z’s) Tsuka-chan. In terms of body building. I haven’t reached Tsuka-chan’s level yet, but I’ve decided he’s my rival.

89. What do you collect?

Nothing. Anime-related items gather together themselves.

90. What do you want to realize in 2017?

I want to lose weight.

91. What is you ambition for the next five years?

I want to learn to make good coffee, starting from the coffee beans. I think if I could do that it would be cool.

92. What is your ambition for the next ten years?

I want to become the kind of dandy who looks good with a beard.

93. What do you think Kis-My-Ft2 is lacking right now?

I feel like we need to level-up one rank as a whole, in terms of dancing, in terms of our concerts, everything.

94. What is your role in the group?

I don’t think I have one! But I have the feeling that it’s alright to have one person who’s like that. Like, “Can you do anything?”

95. What’s is your motto?

“Don’t worry about it.”

96. What advice would you give yourself at the time of debut?

“Your hairstyle is kind of weird.”

97. Tell me the appeal of the other members.

Kitayama - he knows good restaurants; Senga - he’s like a big puppy who’s easily loved by people older than him; Yokoo - his cooking is delicious; Fujigaya - he’s calm; Tamamori - everything; Nikaido - he’s boisterous.

98. Tell me the weak points of the other members.

Kitayama - bad timing; Senga - pollen allergies; Yokoo - he seems angry; Fujigaya - he’s too calm; Tamamori - nothing; Nikaido - he goes overboard with whatever he’s into once he gets interested in it.

99. What is your appeal? What are you unbeatable at compared to other members?

I think my appeal is that I’m foolish, but that can also be my weakness. I look like I’m messing around to people around me. The softness of my hair is what I’m unbeatable at.

100. Please give a message to your fans!

We can be together the whole year! Look at me everyday, okay?

#Kis My Ft2 #Miyata Toshiya #my translation

31 notes · View notes

doesfruitdance · 6 years

Text

Tagged by @queenredhead !!

Rules: answer the questions in a new post and tag 10 people you would like to know better

A - age: 22

B - birthplace: A hospital!! (in Ontario)

C - current time: 1:58pm

D - drink you last had: Water

E - easiest person to talk to: Red! And also Pax!

F - favourite song: oh geez uhh??? I flop back and forth between songs and genres on a daily basis so. Really, my favourite song depends on what scenario I’ve chosen to daydream about????

G - grossest memory: (also one of my earliest sad memories). I was still a kid, like maybe eight? and my parents and I were camping and decided to go for a bike ride/hike around the forest trails. And at one point, one of the trails led to a rocky beach on the lake, so we explored and poked around in the shallows for a bit. Keep in mind the rocks are slippery and you cant really step between them. So I’m walking around carefully, and out of literally nowhere, a frog jumps up onto the rock where I’m about to put my foot. The step is already in motion. There is nowhere else to go and not enough time to react. So I accidentally crushed the poor frog, and I thought it was dead, and I was crying. But it wasn’t dead and it started crawling, and its insides were spilling out onto the rock, and oh my god. I just felt so horrible for the poor frog, and I know it was an accident, but accidental murder is a big deal for a soft-hearted child.

H - horror yes or horror no: horror yes but only in the daytime and never by myself, because im a huge weenie. (Red when we move in together we should watch horror movies together!!!)

I - in love?: OH BOY. UM. ITS REALLY COMPLICATED BECAUSE FEELINGS ARE HARD. I REALLY LOVE BOTH OF MY FRIENDS BUt i dont know where the line between platonic and romantic is, or if im ust not capable of romantic love, and then there are my nonexistent sexual feelings which may just be a side effect of my medications and- so I mean, short answer? Maybe. If I leave my current feelings to fester for a while longer, then yes.

J - jealous of people?: not jealous per se? I get envious of people who are able to do things that I’m not (like work, and leave the house without panicking), but when it comes to people, I mostly get possessive. Not in a dangerous and problematic way? But more so I feel inadequate, and need to constantly remind myself that my friends can have other friends, and it doesnt mean they love me less, it just means they are loving lots of people, because love is infinite.

L - love at first sight or should I walk by again?: You’re gonna have to walk by multiple times, hold a few conversations, and get to know each other, before love comes into the equation.

M - middle name: Kristen

N - number of siblings: I mean, technically i have an older half-sister? I’ve kind of disowned her, because shes a racist, homophobic jackass.

O - one wish: to be able to do things without anxiety and depression constantly dragging me down.

P - person you last called: I DONT USE THE PHONE BECAUSE ANXIETY. its literally been so long since i called someone, i cant remember.

Q - question you are always asked: “So what’s new?” The answer is always ‘nothing’.

R - reason to smile: My family (friends, parents, cousins, cats), dumb youtube videos, the maladaptive daydream scenarios i think up-

S - song you last sang: Eivør - Í Tokuni

T - time you woke up: the fuck asscrack of dawn

U - underwear colour: SIKE, IM NOT WEARING UNDIES

V - vacation destination: I wanna hike across europe!!

W - worst habit: i dont shower often.I pretty much just rinse my hair and wash my bits* so i dont stink. But like, its pretty rare that i actually go into the shower and scrub my legs and arms and all that stuff. (*’bits’ includes pits and intimate pieces)

X - x-rays: Several over the years. Some to check my ankles and toes for breaks, stomach for ulcers, to take a look at my teeth. Nothing super serious though.

Y - your favorite food: LINGUINI NOODLES WITH ROSEE SAUCE AND PARMESEAN AND CHICKEN AND BASIL

Z - zodiac sign: cancer

Here are the people I’ll tag- but im shy so nope!

#about me #me

0 notes

niksong · 6 years

Text

2016: A little older, not much wiser.

2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015

Guys. I’m literally posting my 2016 reflection in November of 2017.

I’m posting what I have. Ignoring what I don’t remember.

It is what it is. This is my life.

2016.

What did you do in 2016 that you’d never done before? Digital Marketing. Performance Advertising. Saw Radiohead at Outside Lands (not necessarily by choice, and I still do not recognize a single song by them. #sorryJH But I did it.). Cambodia. Experienced Angkor Wat, one of the most incredible experiences in the world. Found - and got! - a dream apartment. Hang. Fucking. Over.

Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? To be quite honest with you - I cannot for the life of me remember if I made resolutions or not. 1) I’m not really a *resolution* kind of gal, 2) I can’t find documentation of it anywhere and if it’s not written down, it didn’t happen, 3) I have a pretty terrible memory. I blame it on alcohol most of the time, but I have a creeping feeling it may be more than that. Age, I see you. Looking forward to 2017, I wrote a little sumthin’ sumthin’ up. Here.

Did anyone close to you give birth? I believe the Song clan had a new baby boy join our ranks! S/o to Zayden, the 2nd(?) boy of our entire generation. Boys: 2, Girls: 1MM.

Did anyone close to you die? No. Thank you for this, 2016.

What countries did you visit? Korea! Cambodia! x x x

What would you like to have in 2017 that you lacked in 2016? Purpose. Fulfilling everyday choices. Focus on health.

What dates from 2016 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? Summer 2016, Cambodia. Wine nights in Korea. A getaway trip down to Monterey Bay and the most incredible Hearst Castle. We chased and captured what we could of the sun, we held hands and assigned each other rooms at Hearst, we became obsessed with the varieties of jelly fish, and we forego-ed a nice meal to have our own personal (large) pizzas at Papa John’s. A perfect little trip.

What was your biggest achievement of the year? Successfully changing professions into something that continues to challenge me every single minute of the day. It drowns me sometimes, but I’m growing to be great at something, and I love it. Anything that gives me direction and purpose, is what I need in life.

What was your biggest failure?

Did you suffer illness or injury? Nothing major... But I think this is the appropriate time to talk about November 1, 2016, otherwise known as from this day forth: D-Day. Doomsday. The world brought unto me my first fucking hang over day. I SWEAR TO GOD THE NIGHT BEFORE STARTED - AND ENDED - LIKE ANY OTHER. It was Halloween. Yuri needed to fulfill her K-Pop cravings, so Chris & I, like the good friends we are, agreed to go with her. We donned our costumes - Chris a Snapchat (hoe) dog, Yuri a cat (was she a cat? I can’t even remember), and myself a Pumpkin (because I keep things sexy) - and headed to good ole’ Origin. We drank, we danced, we drank some more because there’s no way in hell I can be sober in a room of k-pop people, we ended up in front of Safeway begging the people cleaning up for some fried chicken, convinced JHart to get out of bed at 2:30 in the morning to come pick us up because drunk Nicolette likes JH better than any Uber driver in the world (sober Nicolette can be convinced otherwise), we got home, I drank water, took a B-12, I even washed my face, brushed my teeth, and changed, and that was it! .........Cue a few hours later. I wake up, head is pounding, I’m definitely drunk, and I realize... I’m nauseous. I’m hella nauseous and no amount of water is making that go away. I chug back a cup, try to go back to sleep, but the pounding... The goddamn pounding. I get out of bed about an hour later because I know *this is it* and go hug my best friend, mr. toilet. I end up throwing up all the water I drank an hour before, I’m nauseous, no longer drunk, head is still pounding, crawl to the couch, and tell myself, “Nicolette, if you watch The Good Wife, you won’t be sick anymore.” I tried. 1 episode, 2 saltines, 3 bites of a banana, lots and lots of telling JH I want to die and convincing myself that this is how the world will end, I end up back in bed, and fall asleep. CUE 30 MINUTES LATER! I WAKE UP! AND YO, I’M GOOD!!!!! According to JH, while this was my *First Hangover*, 1) if I was able to even watch TV through the pain, it wasn’t a *real hangover* and 2) it ended in roughly 2 hours, so wait for the *real thing*. I don’t know how you people do it. How can you drink knowing that this is what awaits in the morning. S/o (and shame) to all my friends who have hangovers every. single. time. you drink, but you let us convince you to come out anyway. Damn. SO DID I SUFFER AN ILLNESS? MAYBE NOT. BUT THIS WAS A GODDAMN INJURY, OK. INJURY TO THE SOUL. NOTHING IS THE SAME ANYMORE. I pace myself now.

What was the best thing you bought? Probably my 12mm lens and Sony a6000.

Whose behavior merited celebration? JH’s. I’ll never forget our big “fight”. We had argued the night before about something silly, and I came to work and joked about it in front of our colleagues. That’s my way of completely getting over something - being able to talk about it and joke about it (if I’m mad, I’m not talking to you. Call me Russia cause I’m Cold War over here.), but that really frustrated JH. He had told me a while before that he was uncomfortable with airing our laundry in front of work people, and if I was going to do it, to do it without him present. I obviously forgot. He was upset, and it was clear that it has upset him. I started bugging him about it as we were walking out of work - ‘why are you mad, tell me why you’re mad, what’s frustrating you, talk to me’ pretty much being incessant and the usual amount of annoying that I pour on him. He stopped me, told me why, and kept going. I then started profusely apologizing because I actually had remembered he asked me not to do that and I really didn’t want him to be angry about this. You see, I had gotten out of a relationship a few years ago where every little thing pissed my partner off and in retrospect, I spent a good year or so simply apologizing out of frustration. It’s a bad habit I picked up, and I was afraid that JH would be upset with me. We got into the car. In the middle of my painful apologies, he suddenly stops me and says “I’m not mad.” Me, unable to comprehend this idea: What? JH: I’m not mad at you, it’s okay, stop apologizing. Me: What do you mean you’re not mad? How do you get unmad so quickly? JH: I sat here, thought about it, and decided it wasn’t worth being mad about. It’s not that big of a deal, and I don’t like being upset with you. You see. This is what being in a healthy relationship is about. It’s about not sweating the small things, being open about what bothers you, having a conversation about it, and forgiveness. I really respected him then. And that’s why I continue to respect him now, more than ever.

Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? Donald Trump. 47% of Americans. Anyone who chooses to support him for whatever the reason is - his “policy”, business plans, whatever it is - it is not okay with me because what you are doing is putting your privilege, your ability to only think money, in front of other peoples’ liberties and basic human rights. That will never be okay with me.

Where did most of your money go? Plane tickets. I can’t remember why or what I did in 2016, but I vividly remember spending a lot of money on plane tickets to visit one place or another. Vegas being one of them. Or 5 of them. I can’t remember how many trips I made last year. #noregrets. (the ticket part, not so much the vegas part).

What did you get really, really, really excited about? NEW JOB. CAMBODIA. 언니 & 오빠들 IN KOREA. PATTY’S WEDDING - THE FIRST OF US HIGH SCHOOL KIDS. APPLE WATCH.

What song will always remind you of 2016?

Compared to this time last year, are you:

Happier or Sadder? Happier? Less stressed. I was very stressed about where I wanted my career to go this time last year.

Thinner or Fatter? Thinner. Surprising, huh? I’m proud of this, so I will say the last time I checked, I was 12 pounds lighter than earlier this year. I am afraid to check now, because I might only be 6 pounds, but hell. That’s still something.

Richer or Poorer? Richer. In terms of numbers, but I feel poorer. I really need to stop buying clothes.

What do you wish you’d done more of? Longer vacation in Korea.

What do you wish you’d done less of?

How did you spend Christmas? 2016? Easy. Waking up early in the morning, running to my parents room, rolling around on the couch for a few minutes until we decide we cannot go another minute without hot chocolate. Race downstairs, wait for the hot chocolate to be made by the best daddy in the world, get excited about all the gifts I successfully brought from SF. Have my sister emcee the gift giveaway portion, rip open gifts, laugh at gifts, gasp at gifts... Speaking of gifts... We had something - or should I say someone - join the Song festivities this year... JH! And while I should say that the Song’s did quite a successful job at gift giving, JH outdid himself. Planned out some of my parent’s favorite gifts of all time and got me... An Apple Watch! A pink one. Okay, “rose gold”, but don’t play, it’s hella pink.

Did you fall in love in 2016? Yes. With Hippatato. It’s a long story, but I’m also still in love with a human too, so 2016 was looking up.

How many hook ups? If we’re talking rando’s, then 0.

What was your favorite TV program?

Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

What was the best book you read? The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss. Courtesy of my book angel, JH.

What was your greatest musical discovery? Without a doubt I want to say James Bay, but I have a sinking feeling that he was the man of my 2015.

What did you want and get? An Apple Watch. A brand new job opportunity.

What did you want and not get?

What was your favorite film of this year?

What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? 26; had to share my birthday with my freaking s/o. HAHAHA. He was turning the big 3-0 so I decided to forego my bday this year (how amazing am I) and plan him a surprise birthday party. SF beer garden, close friends, drunk escape room, the good stuff. Yafs & Yrroh also took us out to Cockscomb for the most amazing steak as well. As we get older, our friend groups get smaller... But man, do they get more fulfilling. <3

What one thing made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2016?

What kept you sane?

Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Who did you miss?

Who was the best new person you met? [Did you meet any new friends this year? I’m sure I did, but to be completely honest, I had a very different approach to this year. I realized somewhere midway that as we get older, we learn how to prioritize more and more. Friends are a great example to this. As social as any butterfly can be, with the very limited amount of time I now have in my life, I decided that I didn’t want too spend that time constantly trying to impress people and have everyone in the world like me. I just can’t do it, and I just don’t care. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about my friends - just the opposite, actually. I decided that this year, I would focus on the friendships that truly mattered to me and to 100% invest in those relationships.]

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2016. Learning to love and be loved by and with an adult.

Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

---

"THE THREE" OF 2016:

Leaving PR.

Heroes of the Storm.

First hangover.

#2016 #my life #year in review #new years

0 notes