earthmoonz - Tumblr blog

[earthmoonz]

heading back down into the mine 👷🏾‍♀️ (switching from gameplay to story stuff)

[earthmoonz]

love when a mutual in law becomes a mutual. like yaaaay :) it's like the godfather but if they all said yaaaay :))))

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[earthmoonz]

go shawty

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[earthmoonz]

Home

[earthmoonz]

when your circle small but y'all crazy!

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y'know i like it when we're naked i can really see your face when you're screaming that loud, its not a bed its a stage.

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[earthmoonz]

the courtyard at the winery, Chestnut Ridge

[earthmoonz]

my current save file involves these three lovely girlies (cousins courtney + rochelle, and their new roomie laila) as they navigate university together and I'm honestly having the time of my life....my girls r in the club fr!

[earthmoonz]

JENNIFER COOLIDGE & JENNIFER TILLY The 14th Annual GLAAD Media Awards – Los Angeles – April 26, 2003

[earthmoonz]

I am afraid, even, to start eating tortillas from the packet in case the rustling is as annoying as everything else I do, so I ignore my craving for them and let the time crawl on with the speed of creeping molasses, as above the garden, the edge of the sky, a deep, moonless blue, is tinged rosy with the first blush of dawn. It’s that hour of the morning that people always swear they are the only ones awake, but I know better. Too many times I have walked the streets at this time, somewhere between four and five, when the streetlights tint the city sepia. I’ve watched the sunrise in dew soaked clothes in somebody’s back garden, from a bench on the seafront, cocaine eyes manic and unblinking while nurses, bin men, delivery drivers climbed into their vehicles on the silent residential street and started their day where I ended mine.

Somehow, at this table with Michelle I feel entirely alone, invisible, like some ghost that insists upon haunting her with annoyances, knocking over a glass here, opening a door there that she’ll only have to get up and close. There is no silence more deathly than the one between us tonight in the absence of our only mutual friend, and I can’t ignore the sting of it. I don’t really understand why it is like this, it just is. 

My mind drifts to King Lear, of a quote from the second act that I can’t fully recall, and in that desperate, panicked manner of someone hours away from an exam, I toss my maths book to the side and fan through the text books on the table in search of the play. I find poetry, I find exam papers, I find the text book but the play is not here. 

“Do you have your King Lear on you?”

Michelle glances up from her notebook, “Not here.”

“Is it… in the house?”

“Yeah, my room.”

“Okay, will you get it for me? I left mine at home, I think, and I really need to look over something for the exam.”

She pauses reluctantly, but sighs as she rises from her seat, “Yeah, hang on.”

When she’s gone I take the opportunity to polish off the cheese tortillas and a penguin bar or two, then, thirsty, I head back into the kitchen and pour myself a glass of water. The coffee machine is plugged in, its filters stacked in a little bowl upon the counter, and I surmise that Debra wouldn’t mind, she told me earlier to help myself to anything in the kitchen. I take a cup back into the dining room and sip it, staring blankly at the wall as my brain buzzes so restlessly with information that I can almost hear it aloud. 

The notebook Michelle has been writing in is open across the table, and I flip it around to read, nosily, though nothing very interesting is written in it. Something about Oliver Cromwell. Her handwriting is nice though, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen something she’s written, and… she’s been gone a while. 

I lift my eyes to the ceiling and listen, though I can’t hear her walking around up there, and all ideas I have about texting her go out the window as soon as I see her phone is still lying on the table next to her pen, so I debate going up to find her. What if she succumbed to exhaustion like Jen and collapsed into bed? The last thing I want to do is go up and disturb her, but what if she’s still looking for King Lear? What if she’s forgotten about it? I picture her rifling helplessly through an impossibly large, overwhelming stack of textbooks while growing increasingly distressed, and I feel bad for even asking her to go.

Perhaps it’s my own exhaustion overtaking the already poorly functioning rational part of my brain, but I leave my cup of coffee on the table and go up the stairs to find her. 

Hers is the only bedroom with stickers on the door. They’re not recognisable anymore, after years of being bleached by the sun that comes in through the south facing landing window all day, and half peeled away, but I remember they were flowers and stars once, and little bubbly letters that spelled out her name in a silver arc. 

MI HELL 

It says now, missing letters and all, considering this room is where she spent six full weeks wailing over Evan is pretty apt, but this is probably hilarious to me alone. 

I knock gently.

Her voice is muffled from within, “Yes?”

“Did you… did you find the play?”

“Oh. No, sorry, I was-” she comes to open the door, “Shh! I don’t want to talk too loudly, no, I couldn’t find it.”

“You couldn’t?” I peer into the bedroom behind her to where a notebook is open on the duvet, “and then what? Were you reading your own diary or something?”

She scowls, “none of your business, I just got distracted.”

I hesitate, “Okay, but like, King Lear?”

“Ugh, King Lear. Look for it yourself,” she steps away from the door and I’m not sure what to do. Has she given me permission to enter? Hesitantly, I let myself in.

“Shut the door,” she commands as she snaps the notebook shut and stows it away beneath her bed, “I don’t want everyone waking up with you talking in the hall.”

“Well I was whispering.”

“You don’t know how to whisper.”

“What? Yes I do, I’m whispering right now.”

“You aren’t, you’re just talking in a quiet voice, that’s not whispering.”

“It is whispering. If I was talking in a quiet voice I’d be talking like this.”

“Oh my God, shut up.Just grab the play and go back downstairs.”

“Yeah. Okay. Where is it usually?”

“Over there somewhere,” she gestures vaguely to the corner of her room with a shelf and a desk, both stacked high with a mound of various books, which isn’t an encouraging sight. 

“Uh, okay,” I try to muster up the strength to search for Shakespeare, but my sleepy eyes drift aimlessly from the shelf to the desk, where a laptop sits next to a cup of paintbrushes and pencils. There are clean clothes folded and stacked on the chair and a wicker basket on the floor beneath the desk. It’s full of crumpled up pieces of note paper, like she’s written and thrown away a hundred furious notes about someone. Evan, probably, but potentially me. Michelle, who is fussing with the pillows on her bed, turns to stare at me. 

“What are you gawking at?”

“I’ve just realised that I’ve never been in your room before.”

“Well that’s because my dad didn’t want you to be.”

“Yeah. I always wondered what you and Jen got up to here.”

“Nothing, really, we usually just grabbed whatever games or magazines we came for and went back down to hang out with you,” she folds her arms, adding, “I suppose we didn’t really get why you couldn’t even just come up back then. It all seemed a bit dramatic.”

“I don’t think your dad liked me.”

“He does.”

“Back then though, I think he thought I’d get up to some freaky shit if he let me in your room.”

“I don’t think he thought that.”

I  huff out a laugh, “I’m pretty sure he did.”

“No, he always calls you ‘that nice American boy’, and lectures me about how I should study hard and focus on my school work to be more like you.”

“He doesn’t know me very well then, apparently. Maybe I would have tried something freaky.”

The corner of her mouth curls up, “No, I suppose he doesn’t know you. You’ve fooled him. I think that he just hated Evan so much that you were like, the preference. He definitely started coming around on you when you were tutoring Jen.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

With her frosty demeanour somewhat thawed I seize permission to look around the room a little bit more. It’s odd, I often pictured what this room might look like as I sat in the living room below and made strained conversation with Michelle’s parents, but it wasn’t like I had many girls' bedrooms to compare it to. I guessed that she had purple walls, because purple seemed like a Michelle colour. Her school bag was purple, and the clips she wore to pin back her hair. I imagined that maybe she’d have glow in the dark stars and a funky, wavy mirror on the wall.

Michelle’s walls are blue. The room is nothing like how I’d pictured it, but she’s seventeen now and this room is like all teenage bedrooms, a hybrid between a child and an adult space. Her favourite toy, a fluffy tiger, is perched on a shelf next to a series of fantasy novels and a pink, childish bedside locker has The Bell Jar on top of it, along with her reading glasses and a digital alarm clock. I’m struck with the knowledge that I will never know what it looked like back then, like the child version of Michelle herself, it is gone. I turn to a cork board on the wall behind me, filled with concert tickets, wrist bands, postcards, photographs, a map of the things she’s done with her life in all of the time that I sort of imagined her sitting around being angry and miserable. I touch a picture pinned to the bottom corner, of her and Jen at the sea when they were eleven. I know exactly where they are, it’s seapoint. I know because I was there too. 

I bend so I am level with it and give it one, sharp flick, “You tore me out of this photo.”

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[earthmoonz]

a little insight into reuben's last week of teendom :)':

[earthmoonz]

Update: North Gaza Aid!

As part of his promise, Hussam sent 20% of your HelpGazaChildren donations ($4000) to Mahmoud AbuSalama for the 5th time now, including the earlier North Gaza Campaign (as location on our notion site) to buy food and necessary products for families still surviving the dire situation in North Gaza. The food package contains, as you see in the picture below: flour, lentils, canned food, formula, diapers, and women pads!

Please continue donating and spreading the word — every penny means so much! Feel free to share our campaign link to other platforms as well!

Donate to our GoFundMe which goes directly to Hussam, who manages camps in Rafah, with NO middleman in between!

HelpGazaChildren Notion Site || #helpgazachildren tag

GoFundMe Link

[Quick ID: The video is of Mahmoud speaking in front of bags of flour and a tumblr sign. There are captions to the video in english. The image below is of groups of packages of items in front of a tumblr sign.]

[earthmoonz]

And here's the whole gang together! Doing these 1940s Mystery Inc. covers has probably been the most fun I've had working on a lookbook and now I'm itching to do more famous character magazines. If you'd like to see each individual cover (including all the CC links), you can find them below.

Fred ✺ Velma ✺ Daphne ✺ Shaggy

[earthmoonz]

The nights of the last gasp of study season seem as though they go on forever, and as I watch the clock on the wall above the french doors that connect Michelle’s living and dining room, I could swear on my life that time is slowing down. It takes an hour for five minutes to pass, while the numbers on the maths book in my hands seem to merge together into some sort of mathematical soup right in front of my eyes. 

For some reason, with Michelle and Jen nattering history facts to one another on the other side of the table, I think about Alison and what she might be doing right now on the eve of the summer exams. Is she pulling an all-nighter too? Maybe, but not for studying. Alison hardly needed to study at all, that’s how clever she was. Even in those party frenzied days of early winter when she and I would pop a molly and stay up until dawn gurning she would still appear in class the next day and answer the teachers questions perfectly with a bored nonchalance about her while I sweated in the seat behind her, fighting a battle that I would inevitably lose to the boys toilets by the eleven o’clock break. 

Alison won’t be studying, but maybe she’s popped a molly without me and is dancing somewhere, singing along to whatever pop song is charting right now and whipping her fiery hair about while I sit here for the eighth night in a row, making my way steadily through a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits that I foraged from the Tengu’s pantry. 

Maybe she’s even getting laid. I peer across the table at Jen and Michelle, pulling faces at one another and arguing over their bullet points for the battle of Stalingrad, and am struck with a reminder of the barren wasteland my sex life has become. It’s been months since I’ve been touched by someone who wasn’t myself and the outlook looks bleak. It’s doubtful that will change any time soon, so while there is every chance Alison is having sex literally right now, the chances for me are worse than being stuck down by a thunderbolt. 

Debra, pokes her head through the door, “I’m off to bed now, loves, is there anything you need before I go?”

Michelle rifles through a handful of flashcards, “No, mam, we’re fine.” 

“Right well, don’t stay up too late.”

“Uh, it’s an all-nighter. That means we’re staying up all night.”

“Well alright, Michelle, there’s no need to take that tone with me.”

“I’m not taking a tone, I'm just explaining something to you.”

“Well I feel like you’re taking a tone, Michelle, and I don’t appreciate it, especially in front of your friend.”

“Him? He’s Jen’s friend, and by the way-”

“Alright!” Jen interrupts, “Goodnight, Debra, we’ll see you in the morning.”

Debra steps back into the living room with a hassled, “Goodnight.”

I glance at Michelle, who stares back at me with the same naked fury simmering in her eyes that has been there since the library, daring me to speak to her, but I couldn't be bothered to traverse that landscape. Not a hope. These days I only speak to her when strictly necessary. I turn back to my books and start pencilling out another equation. 

As the night drags on, my eyelids become weighty as my focus slowly wavers, and Jen, in tandem, becomes lethargic in her seat, head lolling over the back of it, bleary eyes on the cornicing on the ceiling as though they hold the answers to the questions that Michelle is grilling her with. She will resign soon. I flip a page of my maths book and reach for another chocolate biscuit, only for my hand to connect with empty packaging. Did I really eat all that? Oh well, I’m still growing. 

My voice is croaky from disuse when I speak, “You have other snacks?”

Michelle acknowledges me reluctantly, “Cupboard above the microwave.” 

I raid her kitchen for half a packet of cheese tortillas, some penguin bars and some salted peanuts. At the back of the cupboard I spy Michelle’s precious Nutella, of which she started a war against her parents over during those fraught early days of her break up, and for some strange, vengeful moment I feel compelled to unscrew the lid and dunk my whole finger in it, lick it clean and then toss it back, hoping that by the time she notices what I have done I’ll be long gone. 

I return and throw a penguin bar across the spread of papers to Jen, who misses and it thwacks against the wall behind her. She groans at the prospect of picking it up, shifting her body like it is composed of lead and slumping to half heartedly scoop it from the floorboards with limp fingers. “I’m sleepy,” she groans, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Michelle is stern, “You’re not sleepy, you’re fine, just have more sugar.”

“No, I am. I can’t think anymore. I feel drunk.”

“Come on, Jenny,” I say with gentle encouragement as she hoists herself like a sack of potatoes back into the chair, “You can manage, just another hour, huh?”

“An hour? It’s already three in the morning. I can’t.”

Michelle places a hand on Jen’s, still clutching the chocolate, “We just have a few more things to get through, just to make sure we really have the best chance of good marks tomorrow, yeah?”

“And I’m, like, eighty percent through this maths stuff,” I chime in, “I want to have a look over quadratic equations and then just do a quick refresh on trig…”

Jen looks at us as though we’ve gone insane, “Then study that stuff,” she says incredulously, “I’m not stopping you.”

Michelle and I exchange guilty looks. 

“Why do you need me here to study? Are you afraid to be alone in the same room or something? God.”

Jen’s eyes are sunken and heavy, her makeup smudged from where she has been rubbing them, the same way she did as a child when everything got too much for her. “If you don’t let me sleep I am going to break down crying, so either study on your own or stop studying, I don’t care.” She heaves herself from the table and staggers towards the door, “Goodnight, losers. Talk or don’t talk, I couldn’t give less of a shit,” and with a yank on the french doors she is gone. 

And the clock ticks. 

And a page flips. 

And we don’t say a word.

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