#a workshop for building them... just lie on the floor all day and sew like the world depended on it...

[chiropteracupola]

the thing about being up to ceramics stuff nearly every day for the last several months means that now that I have no ceramics to do, I can only think about the fact that I want to do ceramics.

[panismightier]

Generation Three

"Generation Three" is the short story I wrote for my fiction workshop this past semester! It's about 13 pages long (double spaced), so be sure you have time for it! I'll reblog it a few times for a bit after this. CW: a brief mention of suicide.

------

I was born in a tin can to die in a tin can.

My name is Sylvia Chavez, and I’m in Generation Three of the Miranda mission. When my parents were kids, old enough to remember but too young to have a say, their parents signed up for the world-expanding, paradigm-shifting mission of interstellar travel. The Miranda mission will take hundreds of people, thousands by the time the ship arrives, to TRAPPIST-1e, and they’ll start a colony there. Build a brave new world.

I won’t be around to see it.

See, the TRAPPIST-1 system is nearly seventy light years away. The Miranda doesn’t travel at the speed of light, only about a third of it. It’s a two-century flight, give or take. One way. Of course.

My life on this ship is pretty straightforward. I won’t have any responsibilities until I hit breeding age around thirty, and then I spit out a few kids and help raise Gen Four.

------

I eat lunch every day with this girl Lauren. That’s it, just Lauren—she was born to very communal, “takes a village” people. Lauren didn’t get a last name, because she’s the whole station’s daughter.

It felt like it, too, when she was born. She’s only sixteen. She was born after everyone thought Gen Three was full, and then Marcus offed himself and Lauren’s parents jumped to fill his slot. I was only eight, but it’s easy to remember how everyone doted on her.

She’s tiny, and not just because she’s young, with pale skin and ratty blonde hair that makes two little ringlets in the front where she twirls it. She’s always in the same worn-out blue sweater, except for the days it’s getting washed, and she always eats applesauce.

Lauren works in fashion design. Not that it means much here. She’s on a team of five, and they make the clothes for everyone on the station. They get to define fashion. Lauren mostly makes pajamas and lounge clothes, though, so I don’t think she cares much how it looks.

She’s scribbling down patterns now. She’s finished her applesauce—she always scarfs the stuff—but she’s waiting for me today.

“Don’t you have a special desk for that?” I ask her, pointing my fork at her patterns. It’s hard, to my untrained eye, to work out what kind of garment it is, but her paper hardly leaves room on the table for my plate.

“Yes,” she says. Eli waves to us on his way out of the lunch hall, but Lauren either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.

“Why don’t you use it?”

She shrugs, not looking up from the table. “You’re here. I like you.”

I grin. “I like you, too.”

“I want to show you something after.” Lauren pulls something from her bag that looks like a big, curved ruler and lays it on the table to trace.

“Show me what?” I move my plate to the bench next to me as she shifts the paper to cover the last clear foot of table.

She smiles, but still doesn’t look at me. “It’s a secret.”

------

Lauren’s secret is a tour of where she works. I’ve been there before—I’ve been to every one of the Miranda’s 700-odd acres more times than I can count, and Lauren’s workspace is, frankly, one of the least interesting. Not nearly as fun as the 0-G rec center. Well, Lauren’s always had an odd idea of fun.

She works in a big room on the second floor of the community center, full of long, cloth-strewn desks, scattered dress forms, several mirrors, and a line of sewing machines. Lauren grabs my sleeve and tugs me to the second table from the back. It’s even more of a mess than the others, and she pulls out the pattern she was working on before and drops it over the top of everything. Silently, she pulls up her chair, picks up a pair of scissors, and starts cutting the pattern out.

I watch her for a while, uncertain of what I’m meant to be doing. “Not that this isn’t fascinating,” I lie, “but why did you take me here?”

“I thought you’d want to see. Here, hold this,” Lauren says, shoving a piece of the pattern at me. It looks like the front of a shirt, so I hold it up to my chest.

“See what?” I ask as Lauren starts tugging at the paper, pinning it to my t-shirt. “And what are you doing?”

“Measuring,” Lauren says.

It’s the closest thing to an answer I’ll get out of her. I’ve learned to trust her judgement despite how little she explains. I wait for her to make her marks and unpin the pattern before I ask again: “What did you want me to see?”

She doesn’t stop moving. “This.”

“This what?”

“This.” She lets go of her work long enough to make an expansive gesture around the room.

I follow her gesture, watching carefully for anything terribly interesting. “I don’t get it,” I admit.

Lauren shrugs. “Something. Just something new.”

“There’s nothing new here.”

Lauren doesn’t answer. She moves behind me to pin something to my back.

“Why’d you want to show me something new, then?” I ask, watching her work in the mirror across the room.

“You’re bored all the time,” she says. “You should do something.”

“Like wh—ow!” I flinch away from a pin prick. Lauren mumbles an apology and pats my shoulder where she pricked it. “It’s fine,” I assure her. “I should do something like what?”

“Something,” Lauren says.

I won’t get any specifics out of her, then. “Why should I do anything?” I ask instead. “I have everything I need. It’s nice not to have to do anything.” Like Grandpa’s always told me.

“But are you happy?” Lauren asks around a mouthful of pins.

“What?”

She unpins the pattern, sets it on her desk, and spits out the pins, then leans forward to look me in the eye. “Are you happy?”

------

Grandpa’s putting together a jigsaw puzzle on one of the greenhouse tables. He loves the things. I’ve tried to show him the app on our tablets that would give him thousands of puzzles, with the added benefit of never getting messed up by gravity fluctuations, but he insists on the physical version, something about how the pieces feel in his fingers. There are six jigsaw puzzles on the Miranda. Four are for toddlers, and the other two Grandpa has committed to memory. His favorite is missing three pieces. At least one of those, I ate as a baby.

“Don’t you get bored?” I ask him. The greenhouse is hotter than the rest of the station, so I’ve taken off my shoes and jacket.

He shakes his head, snapping in a new piece every few seconds. “I love that I can do what I want here. That never gets boring.”

“Doesn’t it?” I poke my fingers through holes in the table, even though I’ve gotten them stuck enough times that I should know better.

“Are you getting existential again?”

“Maybe.”

Grandpa sets down his puzzle piece and looks up at me. “Listen, Sylvia,” he says, “I don’t know if there’s some grand design. But I do know that you were lucky enough to be born knowing exactly what you’re for.”

I give a noncommittal grunt.

“Have I told you about the paradox of choice?” Grandpa asks, leaning forward over the table.

“Yes.”

“The more options you have, the less likely you are to be satisfied with what you choose,” Grandpa explains anyway. “You have one choice—”

“—so I have no choice but to be happy with it, I know. I try to gesture, but my finger is stuck in the table. “You know it doesn’t really work that way, right?”

Grandpa chuckles, like he doesn’t think I mean it.

“Lauren asked me earlier if I’m happy,” I say.

“Lauren’s a bit of an oddball.” Like I haven’t heard this from him before. “All the workers are.”

“I know,” I say quietly.

“Why work if they don’t get anything out of it? I’ll never understand them.” He’s gone back to his puzzle, placing piece after piece in neat rows. It’s a picture of the launch of the first Miranda capsule, the little pod that took the first couple families to the station. We use it as storage now. I wonder if Grandpa’s realized he’s just assembling and reassembling a broom closet getting thrown into space.

“What do you get out of puzzles?” I ask.

His mouth opens, silent. “It feels good to finish them,” he says eventually.

“Even though you take them apart again right after?”

“It’s not the same thing,” he says, catching on to where I’m going. “This is a hobby, not work.”

I scowl. “I don’t get it.” I catch sight of a gardener pruning back a hedge behind Grandpa, so I call to them, twisting my finger out of the table to wave them over.

Clive is short and stout, with brown skin slightly wrinkled with smile lines. They’re one of the younger Gen Two people: they were the youngest baby when the mission launched, and moderately famous until Zo became the first baby born on the ship and eclipsed them.

“Why do you do greenhouse stuff?” I ask them. Clive stows their shears in their overalls’ pocket and pulls an exaggerated thinking face.

“Sylvia won’t understand the difference between a job and a hobby,” Grandpa explains, “so maybe you can shed some light. I don’t understand you workers.”

Clive brightens. “Oh, I don’t think there is a difference, for me,” they say. “I work in the greenhouse because I love it, and if it makes other people happy, all the better.”

“So that’s the difference?” I ask. “Work helps somebody else?

“When you ask Lauren for dresses, it’s work,” Grandpa says, “but when she makes you one without you asking, it’s a hobby.”

“There’s no real difference for her.” I’ve asked, and she’s nothing but delighted when people commission her. “Besides, if an artist draws for themselves, but puts the picture up in public, is that work or a hobby?”

“Does it matter?” Clive slides on the bench next to me and folds their gloves on the table. “We only do anything because we want to. Nothing’s really work.”

“I watch you sweat out here every damn day,” Grandpa says.

Clive shrugs. “And I watch you put together those puzzles. Why don’t you glue one and have something to show for it, for once?”

“I’d run out of things to do.” Grandpa’s nearly finished with this puzzle. He can’t have been here longer than an hour. “Besides, someone made sure I wouldn’t have all the pieces.”

I give him a dirty look.

“The nice thing about gardening,” says Clive wisely, “is that you don’t run out of things to do. They stretch their arms over their head, showing the tight muscles in their arms. “That clear things up, Sylv?”

“Yeah,” I lie. “Thanks.”

“Any time!” Clive scoots back off the bench and tugs their gloves on. “Any chance of a new recruit for my greenhouse squadron?”

I force a smile, but don’t answer as Clive returns to trimming the hedges. Grandpa finishes the puzzle and I stick my fingers in the table.

------

Lauren meets me for lunch the next day with three bandaged fingers and a folded-up grey cloth. “Try this on,” she instructs me without preamble, pushing the cloth at me. “Over your shirt is fine.”

She drops her bag on her usual bench and goes to the kitchen. I shimmy out of my skirt and pull the new dress over my head. It fits impeccably, as always. It’s hard to make out the style from here, but it’s a heavy fabric, almost like canvas, with a loose skirt dropping almost to my ankles. Each side has a pocket big enough to stick my arms in nearly to the elbow. I twirl and smile as the skirt billows out

Lauren returns with applesauce. “Do you like it?”

“I love it,” I tell her, “Like always. What inspired this one?”

Lauren brightens. She loves talking about her process. “I like the gardeners’ overalls,” she says. “I wanted to make something to remind me of them, but the dress probably isn’t good to work in, so I thought, Sylvia looks like she should work, but doesn’t, so maybe she wants it.” She takes a scoop of applesauce.

For a moment, I’m reeling. The rough fabric scratches at the base of my neck. “What do you mean, I look like I should work?”

“You never answered me yesterday,” Lauren says. “Are you happy?”

I look at the table, one thumb tracing the inside hem of the pocket.

“I’m not unhappy.” “Are you happy?”

“No.” Suddenly, I’m irritated, a heat flaring under my skin. “Is that what you want me to say?”

Lauren swallows the last of her applesauce, and then swallows again, blinking hard. “I was just asking.” She lets the silence hang as she collects herself. “Do you want to get food?”

My stomach growls. “Yes,” I decide, and head towards the cafeteria, the heavy new skirt swishing around my legs.

------

It takes me another four days to visit the greenhouse again, even though Grandpa makes a visit without me. He says when he gets back that Clive asked after my “quest to understand the nature of labor,” so the next day I go myself.

Clive is still there. I’d say they sleep in the greenhouse, if I didn’t know better.

“Hi,” I say, almost nervous. Before Clive can turn around, I ask them,

“Did you mean it about recruiting me for the greenhouse...whatever?”

Their eyes light up. “Of course! Does that mean you’re interested?”

I hesitate, even though I’ve known my answer for four days. “I...think so, yes.”

Clive beams and bounces on to the balls of their feet. “I could hug you!”

“Go ahead.” I grin back and open my arms. Clive is warm and solid and hugs so tight they crush the breath out of me.

Gardening is harder than I thought. Clive is a patient, enthusiastic teacher, but they pile so much on me so fast I have no idea how to absorb it all. After a few hours and a frustrated threat of quitting, they tell me to scrap everything they’ve been telling me, dart into a shed half-hidden in the hedges, and come back with a dried-out pea. “We’ll start slow.”

I take the pea. “We’re planting this, then?” I ask, too exhausted by the past few hours to question them.

“Yep!” How Clive has maintained their enthusiasm is beyond me. “Put it on the ground.”

I do.

“Poke it in with your finger, about an inch deep.”

I do. The soil is cool, and fluffier than I would have expected before Clive’s boot camp.

“Done.”

“Done?” I look up at them. “It took you hours to tell me to stick a pea in the ground?”

“Done for now.” They grin and offer me a hand up. “Sylvia Chavez, that is your pea.”

I blink. “Yeah?”

“You’re its mother. You planted it in the ground, and now it’s your responsibility to water it and check on it and make sure it grows into a healthy pea plant, one that you can pick pods off of and eat right there.”

I gasp. “I’m going to eat my grandchildren?”

Clive snorts, then doubles over laughing. “A poorly-chosen metaphor,” they concede. “The point is, it really doesn’t matter if it’s a job or a hobby. That pea is your something, because it’s your something.” I pull a face.

“Listen, Sylv,” Clive says, their smile fading. “I don’t know you too well, but it seems to me like you’re aimless. Maybe gardening isn’t your calling, but just try it out, okay?”

I wasn’t really prepared to Clive to get serious on me. “Why?”

“In about a month, that pea is going to send little shoots up,” they say, pointing at my finger-shaped hole in the ground. “And I think you might understand then why I garden, and why your grandpa does puzzles.”

“And why Lauren makes dresses?” I ask.

Clive’s smile returns. “And why Maurice cooks, and why Zo cleans things, and why Pax likes singing better when people listen.”

Nervously, I smile back. “Seems like a big ask of a little pea sprout.” “Then you’re giving the pea sprout purpose, too.”

------

A month later, I have a surprise for Lauren. I swore Clive to secrecy, but the greenhouse is public and gossip travels fast on the Miranda, so I’m concerned she already knows. If she does, she hides it well.

I make her close her eyes as I take her to the greenhouse. It’s not a long walk—there are no long walks on the Miranda—and the heat and earthy smell of the greenhouse is strong enough that I see a knowing smile on her face as we approach. She still doesn’t say anything.

I take her to my plant and tell her to open her eyes. She doesn’t see it at first. It’s tiny, barely sprouted an inch out of the ground, and its tiny leaves don’t draw much attention. But when I kneel down to point at it, her face lights up.

“Sylvia!” she says. “You did something!”

“I did!”

She crouches down next to me, then drops to her hands and knees to give the plant a gentle kiss. “You made it grow all by yourself?”

“Clive helped me,” I confess.

“But it’s yours.”

“It’s mine.”

She leans back, sitting on the balls of her feet and looking somewhere over my left shoulder. “How does it feel?”

I look at the plant. How does it feel? This little sprout is alive thanks to me. Its soil is damp (too damp, Clive keeps telling me) thanks to me. How does it feel?

It feels like a lot. There’s been dirt under my fingernails for a month, because Clive’s thick gloves were too clunky for the gentle touch the pea plant needed. My back and legs ache from all the crouching I’m still not used to. A month was long, and more than once I wanted to quit, but Clive threatened to let the pea plant die if I did. To my own surprise, I found I cared too much about the seed to risk calling their bluff.

I feel beaten. I feel proud. I feel tired. I feel full.

I pat the little pea plant’s leaves and glance back up at Lauren. “I’m happy.”

[conventionhorrorstories]

Alright, so this is a sort of tense incident with a now ex-friend of mine that occured at a recent con. But, it was one of many events/situations that builded up and made me really feel disgusted. And the annoying fact that I realized that she was a hypocrite, lmao.

So, let’s call her Y, since she was cosplaying Ayano Aishi; Yandere-chan from Yandere Simulator.

At first, the beginning of the con was quite exciting, since I convinced Y to get a cosplay and wig for the first time ever and I’d have to admit she looked very pretty! She even put in the effort of adding on fake blood, which I thought was admirable in a way. Anyways, she realizes that her fake blood is coming off and she forgot the container of it at home. She uses lipstick as a substitute and dumb me thought that she wouldn’t let it smudge on me or anything. The costume I was wearing was a seifuku but the shirt was mostly white. I was cosplaying Mahiru Hiiragi from Seraph of the End.

After coming back from the bathroom (she was fixing her lipstick blood in there), I noticed that it was time to go to the Seraph of the End panel that I was invited to. At the panel, she was extremely loud. Almost every time one of the panelists said something, she would blurt out something. It’s like she doesn’t seem to have a filter. And at this panel, she was making gross comments (implying sexual) about a popular ship. I remember that during this panel, the panelists were all eating pretzels and threw one to her. It landed onto the floor and when she leaned over to pick it up, she “tripped” (she does this to get attention and sympathy, and also to be that clumsy annoying anime girl trope) and under Y’s skirt she decided not to wear any shorts???? So, her skirt lifted up and you saw her underwear. And she even told me earlier that she wore them as a reference to the YanSim thing where the player can wear certain undergarments for skills or whatever, so she was willing to not wear shorts for this. Keep in mind, Y is a minor (15). And outside of the con, she does this too anytime she wears a skirt or anything short and it’s disgusting.

At another panel that we were in the audience, was a workshop one about sewing. She made this joke that she sucked at sewing, making up a lie on the spot about how Y sewed her hand to fabric for some reason. She nudged me and smiled, but I was extremely confused because she had never sewed in her life… She lied for attention.

In the elevator we encountered some cosplayers and we were trying to get to a floor that took us longer to get to for some reason. And so Y would loudly monologue to me to catch others’ attention and make up lies to seem funny and ditzy, which were honestly getting on my nerves by then. On multiple occasions, she would reuse her own jokes and after hearing her repeat herself so much, it gave me a headache.

Then, during the middle of the day, I realize that the lipstick smudged on my outfit and god I was soooo pissed. Y kept apologizing and stuff and I just said “it’s okay” but on the inside I was quite angry. Lipstick is difficult to get off of clothing, but luckily after the con I managed to remove the stains.

I do realize that at cons sometimes, my anxiety is way worse than anywhere else. I become extremely antsy and always on edge and during the elevator thing, there were a lot of people and I had to stand near my ex-friend because I hate enclosed/small spaces. I even stated that I felt like I was going to have an anxiety attack or faint and my friend just laughed it off and ignored me so she could monologue and be cringey.

At the end of the day, she asks me if I can give her a ride on Sunday of the convention and of course being the kindhearted friend I am, I agree. Midday on Sunday, my con friend that I’ve seen at pretty much every con in my state says that we should go out to eat so I agree to that too. I didn’t know what to get and my ex-friend paid for me. I was so picky when I took a bite and I just gave the sandwich back to my friend. It’s like, she’s technically getting her money back anyways but just in food form(?). Personally, I found nothing wrong with this.

During the con she currently had some serious beef with another irl friend of mine and she made me hate her because of the infamous lies this ex-friend told me. Let’s call this nice friend B. Now that I know B a lot better, she’s honestly an angel and a sweetheart. In fact, we will be doing a matching cosplay at the next con in January 2017 and I’m hyped. But my friend told me at the con and outside of the con some bad shit about her, and at the time I believed everything that the ex-friend had told me. I was really gullible. She also talked shit about me after the con (at school or over text I can’t really remember) to B, saying that I just wasted her money on the food and straight up called me a bitch for the way I was acting at the con. I can’t control my anxiety but apparently she thinks I can? And, not to be rude and inconsiderate, but I was her only way of getting home on that Sunday and I could’ve easily said no, and left her at the con like a jerk. But I didn’t. Y is also one of the many people who just worsened my trust in them. I helped her and guided her throughout the con so for her to call me a bitch kind of hurt me, but I got over it.

Without making this rant longer, I became better friends with B because she was the one who made me realize that Y was a rude, horrible liar who makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

Sometimes, Y still thinks we are friends for some reason.