#2020 was the optimal year for literally anything

[a-silent-symphony]

"Things have always been ****ed up." How death, cancer and a whole pandemic helped make Yesterwynde the most optimistic Nightwish album yet

Tuomas Holopainen was a teenage misanthrope. Growing up in the small Finnish town of Kitee, he had the regulation all-black wardrobe and the soundtrack to match. “I did not use to be an optimistic person when I was younger,” he says. “I loved black metal and all that. But I started to come to the realisation that things have always been fucked up, but we’re still going for the better despite the horrible things that are going on in the world.”

We’re sitting in a suite in an upscale Berlin hotel, as mid-morning traffic flows along Potsdamer Platz several storeys below us. Literally as we talk, unthinkable things are happening all around the world: war, abuse, torture, murder, wilful destruction of the climate. The grim realities of humanity in 2024, basically.

But right here, right now, all that seems a long way away. Not because Nightwish’s keyboard player and band leader is in epic denial mode, but because his band’s 10th album, Yesterwynde, is charged with emotion: hope, beauty, positivity and, yes, optimism.

It’s an unexpected choice on more than one level. Aside from the rolling catastrophe that is the 21st century, Nightwish themselves have been battered by turmoil over the past few years. Their last album, 2020’s Human. :II: Nature., was released during the first, intense throes of the pandemic, scuppering their plans to tour it. When they did return to the road in May 2021, it was without longtime bassist Marko Hietala, who cited a mixture of long-standing depression and disillusion with the music industry for his decision to leave the band.

On a personal level, things have been no less turbulent. In 2022, singer Floor Jansen revealed that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer (she was given the all-clear following surgery). In June 2023, the singer – pregnant with her second child – collapsed with exhaustion following a Nightwish show in Finland, prompting the cancellation of two subsequent solo gigs. Amid all this, Tuomas’s father, Pentti Holopainen, passed away in 2021.

Other bands may have buckled under the battering of the last few years, but Nightwish – and specifically Tuomas as their chief songwriter – have taken a different path. Rather than wallowing in trauma, Yesterwynde pushes back against it. The 12-track album covers a lot of emotional ground across its 69 minutes, but the overwhelming sense is that, honestly, everything is going to be OK. “Yesterwynde has a very optimistic vibe to it,” says Tuomas. “It celebrates life and humanity and mortality. The important things.” 

Yesterwynde begins and ends with the sound of an old film projector starting up and winding down. It suggests a movie is playing out in between. What exactly that movie is, Tuomas Holopainen isn’t letting on. “It’s something different for everybody,” he says, smiling but evasive. Musically, Yesterwynde is everything we have come to expect from Nightwish, only more. One song, the hyper- dramatic An Ocean Of Strange Islands, features over 600 studio tracks and sounds like it. Another, The Children Of ’Ata, was inspired by the real-life story of a group of teens from Tonga stranded for 15 months on a remote island in the Pacific, and features five indigenous Tongan singers. Elsewhere, Yesterwynde features two separate choirs – one classical, one kids – and three different orchestras, all recorded in London’s prestigious Abbey Road Studios, naturally. There are no side-long epics – only two tracks, An Ocean Of Strange Islands and first single Perfume Of The Timeless, stretch beyond eight minutes – but it still feels bigger, bolder and more grandiose than anything else out there right now.

But amid the dramatic power and intricacy, there’s the emotional core that sets Nightwish apart from every corset-clad knock-off that has followed in their wake. That emotion is conveyed by both the music and Floor Jansen’s career-best vocal performance (as on the two other Nightwish albums she’s been involved in, the Dutch native is joined on singing duties by multi-instrumentalist/resident Brit Troy Donockley). Loss, grief, the existential fragility of humanity and the hope it inspires: it’s all there.

There’s one problem. Literally seconds before we step into the lift to go up to meet Tuomas, a rep for Nightwish’s label makes it clear that he will not talk about the death of his father. On the one hand, this is understandable, even admirable – privacy is a scarce commodity these days, and there’s something to be said for not laying everything out for public consumption. On the other, it’s frustrating – death and birth both play into the big, interlocking themes of Yesterwynde, namely the passage of time and the unfolding of history, and how both make us aware of our own mortality.

This is clearest of all on the album’s closing track, Lanternlight, a moving yet celebratory lament for those who are no longer with us. ‘Gone is the hurt, the wait / Gone is the warmth of day,’ Floor sings. And later: ‘To the meadows I go / I’ll be waiting for you.’ Tuomas won’t say whether it was inspired by the death of his father – “I lost something very dear to me a few years ago, and this song was born out of that emotion,” he offers opaquely – but it’s hard not to join the dots.

“The major theme of the album is time – going back in time, recognising your own mortality,” he says. “Connecting to the past.” The past seems appealing, given how shitty the world is at the moment. “Yeah, it is,” he concedes. “But it’s also incredibly good in many ways. And in many ways it’s better – the innovations of science and medicine, the child death rate... A small example: would you rather go to the dentist today or a hundred years ago? “I want to emphasise that I’m not immune to the bad stuff that’s going on in the world. I’m aware of it and I do everything I can to help. But I think it’s good for our mental state to recognise the good stuff. And I think that we have the chance as a species to survive and get together. That’s the core message, the essence, of Yesterwynde.”

Like so many things, Yesterwynde was born out of the pandemic. The seeds for the album were sown after the tour in support of Human. :II: Nature. was postponed due to Covid. “Suddenly I had nothing to do,” says Tuomas. “So I thought I’d better start writing songs for the next Nightwish album.”

For Floor, the experience of making her third Nightwish album was unlike that of making Human. :II: Nature. or its predecessor, 2015’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful. “It was different for me,” she says. “Not bad, not at all, but different.” It’s a few weeks after we met Tuomas in Berlin. We’re sitting backstage at Muziekgebouw, a concrete concert hall in the Dutch city of Eindhoven, where Floor is due to play a show in support of her 2023 solo album, Paragon, later this evening. She’s not alone: her eight-month-old baby daughter, Lucy, is here too, unknowingly sitting in on the interview and letting her mum know when she’s hungry.

Just like many things that emerged from the pandemic, Yesterwynde began in isolation. Tuomas began writing the songs at home in Finland while his bandmates were busy dealing with their own lives. The rest of Nightwish knew he was writing something, but they didn’t know what. “He didn’t email us saying, ‘This is what I’ve written today,’” says Floor. “He doesn’t like sharing snippets, he likes to share the whole thing. But we knew he was inspired.”

The first time Floor heard the new songs Tuomas had written was during Nightwish’s festival run in the summer of 2022, after touring had properly resumed. “Imagine us all gathered in a hotel room, everybody has brought a drink or two, or three, sometimes the minibar is emptied,” says Floor. “Tuomas would play us the music – we didn’t listen to all the songs at once, that would’ve been too much. He’d explain what the songs were about – he’d start off by telling us very little, letting the music speak for itself, but he’d start to go into the depths of what inspired him.”

At this stage, there were no vocals on the record, just piano melodies in their place. But Tuomas would sometimes sing along as the demo played. Floor made voice recordings on her phone to help her understand what the songs were about and ensure she could connect with the emotions in them. “I’m sure he hopes I never put them on the internet,” she says playfully.

Floor’s personal circumstances meant the recording process was different too. Her pregnancy meant she was unable to join the rest of the band at the campsite in Kitee they’ve used for several albums now to rehearse the songs for Yesterwynde. It also meant she recorded her vocals at home in Sweden, where she lives with her husband, Sabaton drummer Hannes Van Dahl (Tuomas was there for the sessions).

“I was pregnant, and before that there was the cancer, and then I had my baby and I was just really, really fucking tired, so I wasn’t there like I had been in the past,” she says. “The connection to the album is much less than it was before, because we haven’t been spending as much crazy time together as we usually would. That doesn’t mean I don’t give a shit – quite the opposite – but I’m still growing into what it means, and what it means to me.”

What song hit you the hardest the first time you heard it? “The last song on the album [Lanternlight] hit me the most,” she says. “When I heard that the first time – he explained what it was about, this song he wrote for his father – it went straight to my heart. It was so beautiful, even in demo form. I sat there crying.”

Even without the pandemic, the last few years have been a rollercoaster for Floor. There was her well-documented diagnosis with and subsequent recovery from breast cancer, followed by her pregnancy. It culminated in her collapse from exhaustion following a Nightwish show in June 2023, while pregnant (thankfully, both Floor and her unborn daughter were fine). Two solo shows were cancelled in the wake of the latter, though no one would have blamed her if she’d walked away from it all for good.

“No, no, I just had to quit for a couple of months,” she says, meaning the heavy workload. “Did I ever think of quitting for good? No, never.” Hearing her talk, it sounds like Floor is in a unique position: a key part of Yesterwynde, undoubtedly, but also someone with a little distance, who is still learning its deeper meanings. What does the album mean to her right now?

“To me, it’s a continuous awareness about the beauty of the planet we’re on and the positivity of us as a species. We get all this negative feedback about killing the planet and hurting each other, and all of that is unfortunately true. But there’s also a lot of beauty to it – humanity has achieved amazing things throughout history, and we should remind ourselves of that. That is sometimes forgotten in the speed of the life we live today.”

For all Yesterwynde’s against-the-grain optimism, Tuomas Holopainen is as aware as anyone of the grim realities of the world in 2024. That was brought home in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when there were fears that Russia’s neighbour, Finland, could be next.

“Not fear, but an awareness,” he counters. “I haven’t felt afraid, not once, even though I live less than 10 kilometres from the Russian border. But we have such a good defence that he is not going to come after us.”

He seems equally unflappable when it comes to matters closer to his band. Earlier this year, original Nightwish singer Tarja Turunen – who was acrimoniously and very publicly fired from the band in 2005 – and former bassist Marko Hietala reunited to tour together and release a joint single, Left On Mars. If it feels like a slap in the face for Tuomas, he hides it well.

“Honestly, I don’t care at all,” he says. “It doesn’t move me in any direction that they have found each other. They can play and perform as many Nightwish songs as they want, it doesn’t bother me one bit.” Have you spoken to Marko since he left? ‘A couple of times.” Are you on good terms? "Yes. There’s no bad blood between us. His leaving was his decision. I was actually quite taken by the fact that in the first interview he gave after he left the band, he said, ‘Don’t anybody dare to put this on Tuomas. This was my decision.’”

You’ve talked about the passage of time. Do you miss the friendships you once had with Tarja and Marko? “I remember the best of times we had, with Tarja and Marko. I’m filled with nostalgia and warmth when I think about the latter half of 2004, for example, which was one of the best times Nightwish ever had, right after the release of the Once album and the European tour. It was just wonderful. But my life is in such a good place at the moment that it’s no more than a whiff of nostalgia.”

That sense of nostalgia is threaded through Yesterwynde, linking the past to the present. But what about the future? For Nightwish, that future seems to be tinged with a degree of uncertainty. In April 2023, they announced in a statement that the band would not be touring their next album – a huge deal for a band whose epic live shows match the grandeur of their music. That decision still stands today. Tuomas is insistent that there will be no live shows in support of Yesterwynde, though he politely but firmly refuses to reveal why.

“The reasons are personal, we’re not going to go into it, but it was something that had to be done for this band to continue,” he says, cryptically. “There’s no bad blood between the members, nothing like that. We just have to take a long breather.” Are there any plans to do anything around the album? A live stream? “We will have something planned, which is not playing music but something else.” Which is? “I can’t say, because we don’t know right now,” he says, unconvincingly. “But there are still things happening.”

Backstage in Eindhoven a few weeks later, Floor is equally unwilling to divulge the reasons behind the decision, though she seems to have a slightly different view of it. “The whole idea of not touring... it’s not mine,” she says. “I wish we could continue, but it’s a mutual decision. Everything with Nightwish, we’ve done with 120%, but if you don’t have the energy to do that, it’s better to take a break.”

Not having to tour for months on end does have its upsides. Tuomas says he’ll spend the time working on a new record from Auri, the side-project featuring his wife Johanna and Nightwish’s Troy Donockley. Floor will likewise use the opportunity to spend time with her family and work on her second solo album.

Both insist that the lack of a tour in support of Yesterwynde doesn’t mean that Nightwish are coming to the end of the road. Tuomas points to the fact that they’ve just signed a new deal with their label, Nuclear Blast, as “evidence there are going to be more albums in future”.

“I’ve seen a lot of reactions, people drawing conclusions,” says Floor. “Making an elephant out of a mosquito, as the Dutch say – making something much bigger than it actually is. It’s not the end of the band, I’m not going to leave, nobody’s angry at each other. There’s a lot of drama been added to this – it’s bad enough that we’re not playing, but there’s nothing more to it.”

In many ways, making such a monumental album as Yesterwynde, and then opting not to tour it, is a very Nightwish thing to do. This is a band who have always followed their own path, even – especially – when it’s flown in the face of popular trends. They’ve watched nu metal, the NWOAHM and the mid-00s emo scene rise, fall and rise again while their own career has followed an unbroken upwards trajectory.

But Nightwish exist entirely in a universe of Tuomas’s own creation. Ask him if he listens to Sleep Token or any of the crop of modern bands currently taking metal in interesting new directions, and he shakes his head.

“No. I don’t listen to music at all anymore, practically. I haven’t for 10 years. I enjoy silence much more these days. Maybe I had an overdose of it for the first 35 years of my life. I’ve heard of the bands you mentioned, but I don’t actively listen to music at all. Though I just heard that My Dying Bride are coming out with a new album. I’ll definitely check that out,” he adds wryly.

Earlier, he’d talked a little more about the imaginary movie that starts and finishes at either end of Yesterwynde. Or, more specifically, the one that runs in his head.

“It’s a very unique one,” he says after a moment’s pause. “I’ve come to realise how incredibly lucky we are to be alive. It’s ridiculous, the odds that we are all here. We should celebrate it.”

[gayferrari]

feel like fia banned something on red bull and it was kept under the rug, because the loss of performance so quick is not normal

Imo they're doing this to make the title fight possible, by nerfing red bull and turning a blind eye to mclaren wings

I think they saw that even with mclaren becoming the fastest car, they would still have no chances against max in red bull so they nerfed the car. Maybe the brake thing idk. There was a lot of talk about that and suddenly not anymore. We never found out which teams were using it.

Ok, so. Standard disclaimer that I'm not an engineer. However. 1) if the FIA had banned something it would be a matter of public record. It would not be shouted from the rooftops with a megaphone because these things are kept quiet, but it would be on record and more importantly 2) if RBR felt they had been unfairly penalised they would throw a whole massive shit fit. We would hear of it.

More broadly, talking about Red Bull's loss of performance this year: I don't actually think there's anything fishy about it at all. It's a combination of various factors.

Other teams catching up. RBR were that good last year because literally every other team has been struggling since the new regs have been introduced. They were doing very well to begin with, but the rest of the field was doing abysmal. Other teams have since stepped up, which makes the field way more competitive at the top

Some issues in development. Reportedly, RBR have hit the ceiling of the performance they are able to extract from the car (given regs & the directions they have developed the car in) and are now in the phase where you start fiddling frantically with what you have hoping to squeeze some drops of performance from somewhere. This can backfire — see how a single update in Barcelona nerfed the Ferrari for months.

Relatedly! These cars appear to be very finicky and temperamental. Just small set-up differences make a lot of difference. If you don't nail it, you risk going backwards instead of improving on your current set-up. Look at how hit and miss Ferrari and Mercedes have been this season despite going broadly in an upwards direction. Development can be very hit-and-miss.

Lack of wind tunnel time and/or bad wind tunnel data. I don't have a source at hand and I wouldn't bet money on this but: I'm reasonably sure it came out recently that the models RBR have been using for their wind tunnel simulations don't actually have a strong correlation with track data. This contributed to going in a less-than-optimal direction development-wise

Max masking some issues out of sheer ability. Again, current gen cars are very temperamental, but Max is a very adaptable driver; it's not the first time that his skills mask the fact that car development is going in a direction of sacrificing driveability for performance until it just becomes undrivable. See this essay by @vro0m with some examples re: 2020 season.

Finally, some brain drain. I'm very much team "Newey is just one person", but he's not the only highly intelligent person that has left the team. (My friend with a bike tells me the poaching attempts are going strong.) I doubt this plays as huge of a part as some people seem to think but it's a small factor.

ALL OF THIS contributed to what's objectively a small but significant drop in performance. But because we are talking about a top F1 team, where the difference is made in the margin and tenths of seconds and the other top teams are currently at risk of catching up, relatively they've had a big drop compared to the rest of the field (who are going up).

As far as I know, the asymmetrical braking reg was all but confirmed to be targeted at Red Bull, but it doesn't mean the FIA arbitrarily nerfed Red Bull just because. It means that RBR were using a regulation grey area to patch up an issue they'd discovered, and regulations were tightened so they had to find a different workaround. Mclaren front wings (which Mercedes are also using) have been declared okay, so you can bet at least RBR and Ferrari will have them by COTA. The flappy rear wing is another issue and we'll see how they rule on it.

tldr: I don't believe the governing organisation for an engineering competition would decide arbitrarily to nerf the engineering side of the sport because it's the only way Lando can beat Max. It's just that a series of small issues all snowballed at once and became a big problem.

tldr #2: if I made major engineering bundles etc feel free to correct me I am but a non-stem tumblrina who reads articles written by actual engineers

[pochapal]

So, putting aside any feelings about the work itself or potential direction changes, what is your opinion on the idea of Homestuck^2 being back, with a new team, and nothing from the old team, when the idea was that the old team was still working on it behind the scenes?

given the way things ended in 2020 i was under no illusion that anyone was still working on hs^2 - the "we're still working behind the scenes" thing was basically a lie since by that time literally nearly all of the team had either jumped ship or was pushed out by a hostile fandom - so it is sincerely a surprise that a) people are working on it again and b) we're actually getting new content for it. i would have put hard money on homestuck^2 being forever dead and even said as much several times this year alone (i still stand by a lot of what i wrote in this post on the matter) so i was completely and totally unprepared for a version of this thing to crop up from the grave.

the fact that it's a wholly new unconnected team is absolutely the only reason that hs^2 is back. everything that happened with/to the old team was a bridge that can't be unburned. i worked through my feelings about what happened to the original hs^2 crew some time ago so i'll be brief: i was absolutely in love with the new, interesting, and challenging direction that team was taking not only hs^2, but homestuck canon in its entirety, and i will always be deeply saddened that their vision was killed before its time and will never be able to be visualised.

the story we will be getting both is and isn't homestuck^2. it will naturally be building off the same frameworks and ideas of the epilogues and what came before it, but it will not end up in the same place. this new team is working under a different outline towards a different goal and i will try to appreciate this new hs^2 for what it is (albeit with a very very veeeery cautious optimism) but the hs^2 i fell in love with died in 2020. the story i am writing about and responding to died in 2020. i am sure this will be a fun ride but i can't help but be wistful about what could have been, and i am unable to ignore the specter of the cruelty done towards its predecessor that hangs over this project. i wish them the best and i am looking forward to it but it isn't the same and it won't be the same and i wouldn't want it to be the same anyway. that moment in time and that creative vision is in the ground and to pretend otherwise would be playing with ghosts. i am interested in seeing something alive.

i really and truly hope things work out better for this new team and they learned from what killed the last attempt at this. more than anything else i would hate for history to repeat.

[dippyface]

sick of being like "how do I make myself get over my childhood" and then being like "well I can't." how do I move on and feel like it's fair that I have to pretend to be a normal person. and not like throw a tantrum when bad things happen in a work environment or something because I'm a frightened Chihuahua. anyway I'm like deep in doomerism and I don't know how to get out. it actually started in 2015 and I finally scrabbled out of it in 2019 and then 2020-2022 happened. it's like I finally learned growth mindset and optimism and then my life said you have to live in a hotel room for 10 months and then lose most of your belongings and then have repeated infestation scares and then have them tear down the hotel you just had to live at in front of your eyes and also you don't remember how to do anything bc you worked the same job for 8 years and were a full lunatic there. and I'm like okay okay time to move on from this and my brain is like actually this has brought up every trauma you've ever experienced. It's literally like I learned that being negative is a cop out and then got my brain ripped out and put back upside down and I'm incapable of believing the truth now. And have lost fully all faith in my capabilities and self. I know the guy in charge and he's a quaking mass of insecurity

[shuahoonie]

holidays with tom [tom holland]

PAIRING: tom holland x female!reader 

SUMMARY: life isn’t exactly back to normal. with another lockdown in place and the holiday season is vastly approaching, you and tom are stuck in quarantine with each other the problem? there was supposed to be at least 5 of you in that house and tom is the last person you want to be with. shouldn’t be too bad right? 

WARNINGS: in no particular order swearing—err foul language lmao, sexual innuendos, things get heated but not that much??? exuding sexual tension but also fluff??? alcohol consumption, a series of bad decisions??? idk writing this made me experience the 5 stages of grief tbh lmao it’s not that bad I promise lmao

WORD COUNT: 6.9k! 

A/N: hello and happy new year! I was supposed to post this during Christmas Day but guess who got into a writing rut—yet again. I didn’t want to abandon this because I actually had fun writing it. I hope you all had a festive and safe holiday. I know things have been hard but I still hope you guys enjoyed the holiday. 

2020 has finally came to an end and we’re all ending it the same way when the pandemic started—staying at home, hopefully following the appropriate health measures. I can only hope that 2021 is a brighter and hopeful year for all of us.

stay safe, sending u all my love. 

gif credits: @underoos-shield​ 

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Two hours. It’s been two hours since you found out that you were going to spend your holidays alone. You were aware that you weren’t going to spend your holidays with your family as you normally would, embracing the fact that working in a different country whilst in the middle of a pandemic was going to be challenging. 

Working in the film industry, constantly visiting sets while still living in a pandemic means that you threw away your chances of being home for the holidays. However, you weren’t entirely the only one who shares a similar struggle. 

“We should still do something for Christmas, you know,” Tom muttered as he watched you lay down on the sofa, your head is supported by the armrest. 

See—it should’ve been you, Ophelia, Alex, William, and Tom in that AirBnB, not just you and Tom.

The five of you reside abroad, however, you all had to fly to Los Angeles for work. You all collectively knew that it would be irresponsible to fly home for the holidays and it wouldn’t make any sense as you would all fly back for work anyway. 

The five of you had a brilliant idea of renting an AirBnB for the holidays since you were all in each other’s personal and work bubble anyway. Obviously, the three of them bailed as they’ve decided to stay with their partners instead, leaving you and Tom alone—which is the last thing you’ve wanted. 

“There’s just us two, Tom,” You replied as you sent a lengthy text to Ophelia, telling and reminding them about what happened between you and Tom.  “I’m not entirely sure if it’s worth anything if we did plan on doing something remotely festive.” 

There are four more days till Christmas and if you were being honest, the last time you felt festive was on the 18th of December...of 2019. 

“Surely there’s something we can do, right?” Tom’s optimism still shined beneath him. “This year has already been shitty enough, we don’t need to feed more into that.” 

The three dots bubble immediately popped up on your message thread with Ophelia as soon as you sent your passive-aggressive rant. Your focus was now on your phone. 

Suddenly, Tom’s face appeared on top of yours—his face was definitely close enough that it’s not CDC approved. He was standing on side of the sofa, both of his palms planted against the armrest as he loomed over you. 

“What do you and your family do during Christmas?” He dared to ask as if he wasn’t towering over you.

Your eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. “Uh—give each other personal space?” You answered out of sheer reflex. You always had a problem with keeping your mouth shut, especially when it sounds rude to other people. In your defence, being unable to do so has helped you put people back in place. 

To be fair, you were used to people standing at least 6 ft away from you ever since the pandemic started. 

Tom’s cheeks went bright red. “’m sorry,” He apologized, giving you a shy smile and scratched the back of his neck. You muttered a quick apology too, for acting so rashly. 

You rose from your position and sat upright instead. “Well, we never do anything special during Christmas,” You said as you threw your hair into a bun. “We usually just go to the movies on Christmas Day because that’s the only thing you can do back when life was normal.” 

Tom nodded understandingly as if he was taking this into account. Now you were curious. 

“Do you guys do anything special for Christmas?” You asked him. 

“Well, on Christmas Day, we would usually just lounge around the house and use it as a chance for me and my family to catch up,” Tom replied. “However, on Christmas Eve, my mum always made sure my brothers and I would have this scavenger hunt to look for our gifts—It’s really fun, actually.” Tom smiled sadly. 

You could easily see how Tom was genuinely broken about not being able to be around his family over the holidays. Heck—he really just misses his family. But who wouldn’t? Britney Spears didn’t sing the line “my loneliness is killing me” for nothing. 

“I’m sorry,” was all you could say. Aside from biting your tongue, being able to easily comfort people was one of your weaknesses too. 

“Oh, there’s nothing to be sorry about, darling.” Tom quickly dismissed the genuine heartbreak he was trying to hide. “We’re all making sacrifices and we chose to be responsible for the benefit of other people.” 

“Yeah, I know.” You said softly. “We’ll just try our best to make something out of this holiday season. I mean—we have to or else we’ll welcome 2021 with a fresh face of misery.” 

“I’m sorry!” Ophelia pouted at the screen as they mindlessly walked around their partner’s place, something that most people do when they’re on the phone with someone. “I genuinely forgot about what happened between you and Tom.” 

“Well, Ollie, it seems like you weren’t the only one.” You replied, adjusting your glasses. Tom seems to be genuinely fine around you, no awkward tensions or anything. If anything, it’s just you who feels weird around him. “But I guess that’s a good thing right?” 

Ophelia forced a smile but they couldn’t, for the life of them, say anything about it. 

“Oh my god,” You sighed “Seriously, Ollie?” 

“It’s just—how could he forget?! You were literally on top of him as I recall and that very much left a permanent image on my mind. I—You know, I really tried my best to forget that ever existing in my mind. So really, if anything, it’s your fault.” Ophelia rambled on. 

“I—I wasn’t on top of him. That’s absurd! I was merely pressed against him” You said defensively, in which Ophelia just laughed atrociously. “Why am I friends with you again?!” You asked rhetorically, bewildered by the fact that you two lasted this long. 

“First of all, that is a hate crime. Second, I’m cool—like everyone wants to be my friend and you should be glad that I gave you the privilege to be even on a nickname basis as me.” 

You rolled your eyes at them. Despite the never-ending banter, you were grateful to have Ophelia as your friend. 

“But seriously, Y/N,” Ophelia said, “You can always just stay with me and Ericka. She’ll be glad to have you over for the holidays.”

“Ollie, as much as I love spending time with you two—I can’t stand being a third-wheel, especially when it comes to the both of you. You two are inseparable when you’re together.” You replied. “I appreciate the offer though.” You smiled at her. 

“I’m just saying—” Ophelia replied, shrugging her shoulder. “Unless you and Tom really want to have the house by yourselves.” They sang teasingly.

“Ophelia!” You gasped. 

“What?” They feigned innocence. “I gave you an option to stay with us! Plus, I know Alex and Will are would’ve asked you to stay with them if they had any idea what happened between you two.” 

“I can’t leave him!” You started to whisper “Tom seems genuinely bummed being here. I can’t just do that to him.” 

It’s as if a light came on inside them. Ophelia started to smirk and you recognized that smirk from anywhere. For christ’s sake, their eyes twinkled like Christmas lights. It drove you nuts. “I fucking knew it.” 

“What?” 

“You like him don’t you?!” They teased, but all you could do was blush. 

“I do not!” You denied it as you could still feel the burning heat emitting from your cheeks. 

“His tongue is that good huh?” Ophelia decided to pry even further. They clearly find enjoyment as you squirmed your way out of this conversation. 

“Bitch, I am ending this call.” That was all you could say. Even if you did find a smart retort, it was no use, especially with Ophelia. They can see right through you and there’s no point in trying to hide it. 

“Honestly, Y/N, we’re living through a pandemic. If there’s any time to make any rash decisions, it’s now. Go get that dick, bih—” 

You drowned out whatever Ophelia was trying to say with your goodbyes and proceeded to end the call. The one time you asked your friend to be serious and they come up with this. 

So—what really happened with you and Tom? 

It was two years ago. You were at a party that you didn’t even plan on attending. However, you were dragged by Ophelia and their partner, Ericka—your new friends in the area. You couldn’t say no to them, they were your first friend in LA! 

You thought about it though, saying no. But when you got a message from your friend back in Canada sending a photo of your boyfriend ex-boyfriend (the same guy who had ghosted you ever since you moved to LA), swapping spits with another girl, you suddenly had the strong urge to drink until you die of alcohol poisoning.

You were burning with anger that you really felt tears pricking your eyes. You were so close to crying or punching someone—whichever comes first.  

One thing’s for sure, though, you weren’t going to cry over a man. So what did you do? “Ophelia, where’s the booze?!” You asked your friend whose eyes nearly popped out of their head. 

Well, you weren’t really going to punch a stranger. Though you felt this burning sense of violence, it’d be much more satisfying to punch the living daylights out on your ex. 

“Y/N, honey, are you alright?” That line always puts on the waterworks, no?  Ophelia was clearly concerned about your newfound thirst for alcohol. 

You furiously wiped the tears off your face. “Um just found out my boyfriend—er ex-boyfriend, who stopped talking to me as soon as I moved here, is seeing someone else now? I don’t know, am I allowed to feel angry when I don’t even know if we’re still together as soon I moved? Fuck—” You tried to explain as you wiped every tear that left your eyes. 

“Oh—of course, hon.” Ericka who handed you a drink. You weren’t exactly sure what it is, but you knew it has alcohol in it and that’s all that matters. You gulped the entire thing and you wanted more. “Y/N, you need to slow down.”

“Are you sure you want to stay? I mean we can crash at our place, eat take-outs, watch movies and be totally disconnected from the world.” Ophelia suggested, but you shook your head furiously. 

“No, I—I’m ok.” You answered “I can’t let the both of you be stuck in misery with me. I need this. I’ll get drunk and if I'm up for it, I’ll hook up with someone. It’s not a healthy coping method but I really want this night to be a series of bad decisions. I don’t want to be myself, even just tonight.”

 So that’s what you did. You were going from one drink to another in record time. Both Ophelia and Ericka kept an eye on you, just in case someone tried to take advantage of your drunken state. 

You were talking to some guy you met in the kitchen, one thing led to another and next thing you knew, you were making out with this dude in someone’s bathroom. Ophelia and Ericka were drunk enough to pester the guy you were making out with but not drunk 

As you were propped on top of the sink and your legs wrapped around his waist, you felt every bit of his lips explore the side of your neck as his hands explored every inch of your body. With his hand under your shirt and his fingers tracing every part of your skin, it just reminded you of how lonely you were. 

Here you were, a thousand miles away from home, all alone just so you could do the one thing you really love. Your family would sometimes call to check up on you but it just wasn’t the same. Your ex tried to guilt you into staying in Canada, but you couldn’t do that. You love what you do and you love yourself too. 

You were willing to risk everything, even if happiness came at a price. 

Now you were crying, and the guy you were making out with definitely noticed. 

“I’m sorry, am I making you uncomfortable?” He asked as he pulled down your shirt. 

“No—no, I’m just—” You tried to calm yourself down. “I’m not sure if I want to do this anymore.” 

“That’s alright,” He mumbled wiping the tears off your face. “Do you want to talk about it? You seem rattled.” 

“It’s just I’m so tired of pretending everything is alright—that I’m okay being alone, that I don’t need anyone. But it’s just so hard because I’m—” You sobbed “I’m so fucking lonely. I’m so tired of being alone.” 

The guy tucked the stray piece of hair behind your ears as he carefully wiped your tears with his thumb. He was just silent as he listened to you sob. 

“I’m sorry, I know you definitely didn’t come to this party to watch a complete stranger cry over something stupid.” You couldn’t even look him in the eye, you were embarrassed as this was the first time you felt really vulnerable—especially in front of a stranger. 

“No, you’re alright.” He tried to console you “I think that’s the beauty in strangers, no? You can act and do whatever you want in front of them because there’s a slim chance you’ll ever see them again.” 

You were definitely drunk enough that trying to make sense of who the person was a struggle enough of itself. You tried your best to look at the guy but your vision was getting hazy and you could feel your head thumping that focusing made you feel like you want to crack your head in half. 

A loud knock on the door caused you two to jump. “I’m coming in,” Ophelia yelled and opened the door. Ophelia looked at the guy for a while, trying to make sense of who he was before their eyes widened. “I remember now—You’re Tom Holland.”

Imagine your surprise when you found out that you were going to work with Tom Holland for a while. You tried your best to avoid Tom at work but of course, that didn’t work out. He never brought up what happened between you two and you assumed he probably forgot all about it.

You tried to rationalize that he meets a lot of people every day. Surely, one failed hook-up wasn’t worth remembering (especially with alcohol involved) and you held on to that. 

At least that’s what makes you sleep at night and also one of the reasons why you considered spending the holidays with him. However, you were also expecting your crew friends to stay with you and not just Tom. 

“Y/N, did you like the gift? It’s from me and Ericka!” Ophelia asked. It was the next day and you two were just chatting on FaceTime. You were sorting out your closet out of sheer boredom. You figured if you were going to stay here for three weeks, the least you could do was sort your clothes out. 

You stared at the neatly wrapped box that Ophelia and Ericka dropped off earlier this morning. “I haven’t opened it yet.” You said as you showed them the box. “I wanna open it till Christmas.” 

“Oh my god, just open it. Christmas doesn’t exist this year, babe.” Ophelia waved their hand, encouraging you to open it. 

“Fine,” You gave in. You opened the box and saw a very lush and well-made lingerie set. “Ophelia, what the fuck” You gasped. You held out the lingerie in front of the camera. 

“Y/N, I definitely outdid myself this time.” Ophelia sighed happily, staring at the screen. “Try it on!”

“Ollie, this is gorgeous but when am I ever going to use this?” You asked holding it out on your body and looking at the mirror. 

“Uh—you’re stuck at home with your failed but also potential hookup,” Ollie suggested, wiggling their eyebrows. “Who knows what might happen?”  

You rolled your eyes at them. “Bold of you assume that something might happen.”

“Something won’t happen if you don’t try that one,” Ophelia said. “C’mon, I wanna see.” 

You shook your head and went out of frame in order to strip off your clothes. You tried on the lingerie—it’s a black lace teddy with a very exposing back. IT fit you perfectly—it accentuated your figure and definitely showed off your boobs. You weren’t really fond of showing off your body but you still tried your best to show it to your friend. 

“What do you think?” You asked, stepping back to the frame. 

“You look gorgeous, babe!” Ophelia squealed. “I knew I made the right choice with black.” 

“I still don’t know where I should wear this though—” You were stopped mid-sentence when your door swung open. 

“I know what we’re doing this—Oh shit. I’m so sorry,” Tom stood there, frozen, his eyes widened and immediately shut the door. 

You couldn’t even say anything. You were frozen in shock.

“Was that Tom?” Ophelia asked from the call, briefly forgetting that you were talking to them through FaceTime. 

You nodded slowly, unable to talk.

“What did he think?” Ophelia asked excitedly. 

You snapped out of this haze. “Ollie,” you groaned. “I think he was mentally scarred. 

“What do you mean scarred? You look great!” Ophelia said, appalled. “If he doesn’t think you look banging in that lingerie then it’s his loss.” 

“I gotta go, I need to change.” You said, bidding Ophelia goodbye. “Thanks for the gift, Ollie. Tell Ericka thanks too.” 

You ended the call and changed into comfier clothes. You couldn’t help but wonder how on earth you’re going to face Tom now that he’s seen you practically naked. Well, it’s not like that’s a new sight. He did see you with your bra on when you were making out in the bathroom that one time. But still! 

Are you actually going to spend your Christmas in your room?

It was the next day and there are only two more days till Christmas. You spent the entirety of last night in your room after the incident between you and Tom. 

You were about to make yourself some coffee when you found Tom in the kitchen, making tea for himself. You stood there frozen, wondering if you were going to proceed to the kitchen or just run back to your room since Tom hasn’t noticed you—

“Oh—good morning, Y/N.” So close. 

You smiled at Tom and said, “Good morning, Tom.” 

You grabbed a coffee pod and waited for the Keurig to make your coffee. You leaned back against the counter and fiddled with your phone—all in the hopes that things move quickly and for this awkward tension to be over. 

Honestly, why were you so worked up about it? People have seen you in a bikini before and that’s no different from lingerie. If anything, lingerie is itchier and has lace. You should be able to feel confident in your own body and you shouldn’t have to mind what other people think of it. It’s yours alone and it’s your opinion that should matter—

“I’m terribly sorry about last night, Y/N.” Tom apologized, sincerity was written all over his face. “I should’ve knocked and I just got so bloody excited about what we can do over Christmas—but that’s no excuse for what I’ve done. What I did was incredibly intrusive and you deserve a proper apology.”

“Tom, I—”

“I wanted to apologize last night—over dinner—but you didn’t come down to eat, so I figured you didn’t want to talk. “ He rambled on. 

“Tom—” 

“But even then I should’ve asked you to come down and eat dinner because that’s what any decent human would do! And yet I didn’t. God—I’m just doing one wrong thing after another—” 

“Tom, listen to me.” 

“Hm?” He finally snapped out and looked at you in the eyes. 

“It’s okay. It was an honest mistake and you sincerely apologized, and for me, that’s enough.” You smiled softly at him. “So—what’s this thing you planned over Christmas?” 

“I was thinking we could do both our family traditions over the next two days. My family and I usually do a roast dinner and open our Christmas stockings on Christmas Eve. Then on the 25th, we can watch movies all day just like you do with your family.” Tom grinned, clearly satisfied with his plan. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s a great idea,” You smiled “However, I don’t think we have any ingredients for a roast dinner and we don’t really have Christmas stockings. Well—I don’t have any Christmas stockings and stocking stuffers.” 

“That’s true,” Tom mumbled “But I have to do the food shopping anyway. We’re running low on food and I couldn't really book one of those online delivery things that most groceries now offer.” 

You nodded. “Okay, so I guess I have to get the house sorted then.” 

When you two first arrived in this AirBnB a few days ago, it had already been decorated for Christmas. It had a massive tree in the living room decorated with stunning and intricately-themed ornaments. Christmas garlands were wrapped around the stair-bannisters and foliages were placed by the fireplace and the tables. 

All you really had to do was clean the place—do a bit of vacuuming and get things nice and neat for Christmas. It didn’t take you too long to do it too. It had only been a couple of minutes since Tom left to do the food shopping and you prayed to the gods that he doesn’t get too much attention whilst out. 

You figured you might as well do some last-minute shopping while Tom was out, so you can grab gifts for him as well. After all, this whole thing was orchestrated by Tom and you don’t even have anything to give him for his stockings. 

You arrived at your AirBnB a tad later than Tom. He was in the kitchen putting things away when he saw you walk through the door. 

“Ah, I was wondering whether I spooked you with my plan,” Tom commented, making you chuckle and roll your eyes. 

“Trust me, I would’ve made it very obvious if you did.” You replied, earning a laugh from Tom. “I went out to do my last-minute shopping. Granted, it’s not ideal since we’re still living through a pandemic, but there’s not actually that many people where I went to considering it’s the Christmas rush.” 

You made sure to hide the stuff you bought using the handmade tote bags that a friend gave you for your birthday. No retail bags, no clue. “How did you survive the groceries? I bet it’s busy out there.” 

“Yeah, it was.” Tom chuckled, scratching the back of his head. “Remind me to never do that again for Christmas.” 

“Sure,” You said, “That is if I spend another Christmas with you.” You said jokingly, hoping that Tom didn’t find that rude. 

“You’ll never know,” Tom shrugged. “What if you liked our Christmas this year and you’d be begging to spend Christmas with me and my family in London,” Tom smirked, playing along. 

“Yeah, right.” You scoffed playfully, crossing your arms. “If anyone’s begging, it’s going to be you.”

Tom stepped closer, “Wanna bet?” He whispered, a teasing look in his eyes. “Whoever has the most fun during our respective holiday traditions would have to spend the holidays with them next year.” 

“Oh, you’re on, Holland.” You took a step closer. “We will both film our holidays for the entire two days and then we’ll ask Ophelia, Alex, and Will to vote whoever looks like they had the most fun.”

“Okay,” Tom nodded “But no editing! We’ll give them raw footage so there are no chances of tampering.” 

You laughed but you agreed anyway. “Of course, we’ll give them hours of footage. The least we could do is make them sit through hours of content after they ditched us all alone on the holidays.” 

Tom gave a broad smile. “Let the festivities begin.” 

It was the 24th of December—Christmas Eve. You spent the entirety of last night wrapping Tom’s presents for later. Not that you despise Christmas, but it’s been a while since you were actually excited to celebrate it. It was pretty clear that the magic of Christmas dies once you grow up. 

Today was different; you were looking forward to whatever Tom has installed for tonight. 

You went downstairs to make some breakfast only to be greeted by Tom blasting Christmas music and preparing some ingredients for breakfast in the kitchen. 

“Good morning, Y/N, happy Christmas Eve,” Tom greeted with a huge grin. “Say, hi to the camera.” 

“Oh, we’re starting this early, huh?” You asked, putting your hair into a loose ponytail. 

“Why of course, we have to make the best out of this,” Tom said, holding the camera to your face. “I made you coffee.” Tom handed you a cup of coffee. 

“Are you using my love for coffee as an advantage?” You tried to hide your smile while drinking your coffee. 

“Obviously not,” Tom feigned his innocence. “I obviously did not know you were obsessed with coffee—it’s not like I don’t see you on set without one.” He mumbled in which you definitely heard, giving him a smack on the head. “Ow! I’m kidding.” He laughed.

You rolled your eyes at him. “So, what’s for breakfast?” 

“We’re going to make french crèpes,” Tom replied and propped the camera on the kitchen island, facing the two of you. 

“Do you know how to make french crèpes?” You asked, washing your hands. 

Tom blinked, almost trying to decide whether he wants to be honest or impressive. “Do you know how to make french crèpes?” He returned the question. 

“Oh honey, my mom resents me in the kitchen.” You replied, taking a sip from your coffee. “But you know, I manage.” You murmured.

“That’s giving me a lot of hope, darling, thank you.” He said half-heartedly. 

“Shut up,” You nudged him playfully, rolling your eyes. “Tom, honestly, most of the footage is just us bantering for 20 minutes.” 

“To be fair, that’s part of the fun.” Tom smiled. “Okay, I think you just mix all of these in a bowl. Start with the dry ingredients first.” He said, looking at the recipe on his phone.

“Okay, that shouldn’t be too hard,” You commented pouring the ingredients into the bowl. As you started all of the ingredients together, you noticed small lumps forming in the batter. “Tom, did you sift the dry ingredients by chance?” 

“You were supposed to sift it?” He asked, completely clueless. 

You nodded slowly. Panic was now clearly painted on his face. “I’m sure we’ll be fine.” You tried to reassure him. 

It was not fine. The first time you two tried to pour the batter in the pan, you burnt the entire thing. It’s not even the cute, lightly burnt crepe. It was activating the smoke alarm-burnt crepe. 

The next one was pancake-like. The next one after that had pocket flours on the crepes because you two didn’t sift your dry ingredients beforehand. You ran out of the batter when you two finally got the consistency right—you managed to get one proper crepe from the entire batter. 

“I feel like Sam would probably curse me out as soon as he finds out I fucked up a simple crepe,” Tom said, delicately filling the crepe with creme and berries. “My brother’s done so well in culinary school.” He cut a piece with his fork and brought it to your mouth.

“Well, you can’t have everything.” You said taking a bite out of the crepe. “This is better than the last one.” 

Tom nodded, taking a bite of it himself. “It’s not as tasty as Sam’s but I’ll take it.” 

“Now, I’m curious as to what your brother’s cooking tastes like.” You commented taking another bite from the crepe. 

“I guess I’ll just take you home to London to find out,” Tom teased with an annoying grin. 

“As long as I’m being fed, I’m fine with it.” You remarked. What in god’s name are you are you two playing?!

The day rolled by very quickly. It was already evening when you finished wrapping the presents for your friends. You plan on dropping it off tomorrow before you persuade Tom to glue yourselves on the couch for the entire day. 

You grabbed all of Tom’s gifts—Christmas stocking included— when you went downstairs, only to be greeted by someone yelling at Tom through his phone. 

“I did everything right, Sam. I don’t know why you’re yelling.” Tom yelled back at his phone. His back was turned against you as he was putting away the pots and pans that he used. 

You quietly walked up behind him and said calmly, “Why are you yelling?” 

Tom probably jumped six feet away from you, making you laugh. You always forget that he gets scared easily. “Holy shit, don’t scare me like that, Y/N.” Tom breathed out, putting a hand over his chest. 

“I’m sorry,” You said whilst laughing. “I promise I won’t do it again.” Tom rolled his eyes, murmuring something about you being insincere about it. 

“Please do it again!” You heard, whom you assume is Sam, say from the background. You looked at Tom’s phone that’s propped on the island and saw his brothers on FaceTime. 

You beamed at them. “Any recommendations?” You asked, hearing Tom groan behind you. 

“Well, he hates—” 

“This is the last thing I want in 2020, for my brothers and Y/N to conspire against me,” Tom said loudly on purpose, drowning his brothers' voices.

“Tom, don’t be rude. Let your brothers finish—” Tom put his hand against your mouth. 

“I’ll call you guys later,” Tom said “Wave goodbye, Y/N.” He used his free hand to grab your hand and forced a wave towards his brothers. The call soon came to an end and you could only roll your eyes at Tom. You seem to do that a lot around him. You also do a lot of that when you try to hide your feelings towards a person you like but that’s beside the point. 

“So are we going to have dinner first or are we going to do presents first?” You asked fixing your Christmas sweater, a gift from your parents since you and your family usually wear matching sweaters for Christmas. “Or are you the type to wait until Christmas Day to open presents?” 

“We can do the Christmas stockings after dinner tonight, then do the presents tomorrow, if you’d like,” Tom answered with his arms crossed. 

You shrugged, telling him it doesn’t matter since you don’t really go all out on Christmas. Your family on the other hand—the house is always full of people, especially since most of your extended family are usually around during the holidays. You had this ongoing game you made for yourself whether or not you’ll be able to greet everyone with the number of people in the house. 

You could only guess how quiet your family’s Christmas is going to be. You definitely needed to call your parents later. 

“Is the sweater that itchy, Y/N?” You heard Tom ask, breaking away from your thoughts. 

“Huh?” You asked, confused. You didn’t even notice that you’ve been scratching yourself subconsciously. 

“You’ve been scratching yourself since I saw you.” Tom said, chuckling. “It’s a cute sweater on you.” 

You smirked. “That reminds me—I got something for you, Tom.” Tom raised his brow as you grabbed the bag you stashed behind the tree. “Actually my parents got this for you. A little thank you gift apparently for having the tolerance to stay with me over the holidays—as if you had a choice.” You mumbled the last part. 

Tom curiously opened the bag and there revealed a matching sweater such as yours. This year’s sweater was green and had red tinsel all over it, probably the reason why you’re itchy. The real kicker is that—

“No way,” Tom gasped “It lights up?!” He asked laughing. It lights up. 

“Yeah, I don’t recommend turning that on. I did it earlier and I’m pretty sure I was about to combust—it’s a real fire hazard.” You replied, enjoying the genuine joy that Tom is showing on his face. 

“Oh but we have to turn the lights on when we take pictures,” He commented as he put on the sweater. “Thanks, Y/N.” He said softly, surprising you with a hug. 

It’s the first real physical contact that you two had ever since that night when you made out and you were pretty adamant that people were just making up this notion of having butterflies in their stomach—they weren’t. 

Tom’s roast dinner went surprisingly well. You kept teasing him that it’s Sam that you had to thank because you knew that Tom wouldn’t last in the kitchen without his brother’s instructions. Tom pouted the whole time. You eventually had to tell him 

“It was sweet.” You told him as you helped him clear out the plates. 

Tom was confused. 

“I don’t think I’ve known someone that went through hell and back just to make a great effort Christmas dinner —even if it means getting yelled at by your brother.” You said, smiling softly at him. “I mean it’s just us two, really. We don’t even have to do this.”

“Think that’s the reason why I wanted to do it,” Tom replied. Now you’re confused. “It’s because it’s the two of us—that’s why I wanted to do it.” 

As soon as you heard those words come out of Tom’s lips, you tried your best to stay calm. To say that you weren’t overwhelmed with emotions would be a huge lie. For someone who couldn’t hold their tongue, you were speechless. Tom’s giving you a run for your money and you weren’t exactly thrilled about it. 

After dinner, you and Tom opened your stocking presents. The presents were pretty tame at the start—you both got each other socks, which was hilarious but greatly appreciated. You love socks, especially comfy and cushiony ones. You came to learn that Tom does too, which prompted you two to wear the socks immediately. 

You got him candy canes, he got you chocolates. You also snuck in those small, in-flight alcohol bottles in there too—which he ended up loving. He got you those 10-pack skincare face masks, in which you let out a huge gasp, making him laugh. 

“Oh, we have to use this at some point!” You exclaimed happily “Like, we need to have a spa night—where we just watch movies, doing face masks, eating takeouts. Oh, that’s the dream!” You sighed happily. 

“We still have two weeks left till we go back to work, I'm sure we can find the time to do that,” Tom said with a permanent smile on his face, watching you with pure joy made him feel like he accomplished something big. 

You got him one of those Instax polaroid cameras—true, it was a bit too much for a stocking stuffer especially since the box definitely stood out against the stocking, but you figured he’ll like it. 

“Darling, this is too much but I’m thankful,” Tom commented as he took out the camera from the box. “I can’t wait to use this and keep memories using it—why don’t we start right now?! Let’s take a photo of us and our matching sweaters!”  

Tom took a lot of photos of you two, in the end. A couple of overexposed photos, one with the matching sweaters, one with your faces pressed against each other, one with your faces way too close to the camera, and one where he gave you a kiss on your cheek (he asked if that’s okay, of course, you said yes. it’s not like he hasn’t kissed you before— still no conversations about that, by the way). It was a good thing you got him at least 3 boxes of those 20 pack films in his stockings as well. 

The real kicker was Tom’s “small” stocking present for you. He got you this dainty, gold necklace with a crescent moon charm. You were pretty sure it was expensive because of the teal box it came with. 

“Stop,” You gasped “Tom, now this—this is too much.” You stressed out. “I can’t have this. Nope, you have to return this.”

Tom shrugged as if it was nothing. “You deserve it. Darling, you deserve something nice after this shitty year.” 

“Tom, I’m serious. This is too much.” 

“I’m serious too, Y/N. Keep it, please. I’d be offended if you don’t.”

After the roller coaster of emotions due to the stocking presents, you gave your parents a call to wish them a merry Christmas. They insisted to do a video call because they wanted to see Tom in the family sweater—which your mom wouldn’t stop gushing about. 

“I think your mum loves me,” Tom whispered closely in your ear. He didn't have to try too hard. With the laptop propped up on top of the coffee table, you two were sitting close together on the living room floor—knees touching, maximum close skin contact. CDC would never approve. 

“Yeah, I think it’s the accent,” You mumbled jokingly. 

Tom moved his head to take a good look at you, smiling. You could feel his eyes burning your skin. Why does he have to look at you like that? Why does he have to be this close?

The initial video call with your parents turned into a whole family reunion when you found out they set up a group call with your extended family. Imagine the dread and fear in your eyes when you heard your one aunt ask, 

“Finally, Y/N, is that your boyfriend?” 

Your eyes widened as you stuttered to say your defence, making Tom chuckle. You frowned at him and nudged him saying, “Don’t laugh, tell them no or I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“No, unfortunately, I’m not,” Tom replied, laughing. “However, I do believe we make a cute couple, don’t we?” He teased, earning an earnest yes from your mom. 

You could only wish for the floor to swallow you whole. 

As the clocks rolled to twelve, it was officially Christmas. You and Tom figured you might as well start opening gifts again because Christmas Day is going to be a drag for the two of you. 

“Okay, start with this.” You said as you handed him a gift bag. You didn’t give him a lot of gifts for the actual Christmas Day because you went all out on the stuffers. 

“Pyjamas?” He asked with a grin. You made a signal for him to give you a minute. You ran to your room and changed into pyjamas. 

“Not just pyjamas, Tom, but matching pyjamas!” You exclaimed, laughing. “I saw it and figured we should do this for my day.”

“Sick!” Tom laughed. Tom got into his pair of pyjamas as well and of course, he didn’t forget to pull out his new polaroid camera to take a photo of you two. “Shit, I forgot to film our entire Christmas Eve.” He said as he saw the camera that was still sitting on the kitchen island from earlier that morning. 

You shrugged. “I’m pretty sure you’ll win either way. Just that content from the breakfast crepes was enough to secure your place.” You said jokingly.

“All I’m hearing is that you’re going to spend Christmas with me in London next year.” Tom sang teasingly. 

“Yeah, maybe bringing you to our big Christmas holidays is a bad idea.” You wondered out loud. 

“I like your family,” Tom commented with a smile “and I think they will love having me there for the holidays.” 

“That would be a nightmare.” You mumbled to yourself. 

The rest of the night dragged on. You and Tom finished the rest of your gifts—you got him a watch, he got you a vinyl player. You two managed to watch the first Harry Potter film before you called it a night. 

You were about to head into your room when you heard Tom say, “Mistletoe.”

“Hm?” You hummed, confused. He placed a finger under your chin and gently tilted your head. There you saw a mistletoe hanging by one of the light fixtures. 

“How did that even—” 

“Can I kiss you?” Tom asked, cupping the sides of your face. 

“Hm?” Tom was definitely giving you a run for your money. How can a girl with a speech turn speechless?

“Can I kiss you?” He asked more softly. All you could do was nod. For if you even dare to open your mouth, all of this would cease to exist.  

His lips gently touched yours and then soon moulded into one. It was soft, sweet—familiar. His lips were something you never thought about—at least not a lot but you craved it. You crave his lips, his touch, him. You were riding a new high and you thanked every single god that you were sober to remember this—because this, this is something you want to cherish. 

“You told me you’re tired of being alone,” Tom whispered against your lips. “You don’t have to be anymore. Not when you have me, not ever.”

PERMANENT TAGLIST: @quaksonhehe @dark-infernal-instruments @trustfundparker @emsma11​ @tomshufflepuff​ @spider-babe​ @goodgirlgonetom​

[dry-valleys]

“Most people today know no more of the canals than they do of the old green roads which the pack-horse trains once travelled”.

LTC Rolt, 1944.

My cycling comeback started in earnest this weekend, as I stormed out from my home in Stoke on Trent, through the industries of South Cheshire, through the junction of the Trent and Mersey Canal and Shropshire Union Canal at Middlewich, (2) Weaver Navigation, Whitegate Way,  Delamere Forest and (3) Frodsham to my goal, the National Waterways Museum, Ellesmere Port. Almost all this landscape is marked by the hand of man; it’s mostly farmed, with many factories, and even the forest isn’t natural, being an old Norman hunting forest owned by the Earls of Chester and owned by the Forestry Commission since 1924. In the 18th century, canal building came into its own. The Trent and Mersey Canal, which flows through my home city of Stoke on Trent,  was engineered by James Brindley from 1766 to 1777, and the Shropshire Union Canal, though not finished until 1846, was built in this stage in 1795 when Thomas Telford and William Jessop realised a plan to the River Mersey and the River Dee at Chester. Thus, the raw materials of Wales and Cheshire could be joined with the finished goods from Manchester, and sail out through Liverpool to the world. It shows the genius of Telford and Jessop that they could come to a marsh where literally no one lived and a thriving town sprang from their vision. In 1833, the Middlewich Canal was built through that booming salt town to link the Trent and Mersey to the Shropshire Union, and Ellesmere Port gained even further from this.

The railways came to Ellesmere Port in 1863; having cycled in (a thing unknown to Telford and Jessop as cycling, invented as an idea by German Karl von Dreis in 1817, was not realised in practice until 1863), I got the train home on a line that has run for the last 159 years.

Facing up to the challenge of trains, the canals still went from strength to strength for decades afterwards; Anderton Boat Lift was engineered by Edwin Clark in 1875 linking the Weaver Navigation and the Mersey, which you can see here from when I went there in 2020.

The opening of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894, which I recommend seeing in its home city, was a further boost to the town and its canal, port and docks.

The town thrived with dozens of roads being built here, especially (6) the M53 motorway (1972), and the vast Stanlow oil refinery, built in 1924 (which I’ve wanted to see ever since seeing it from Frodsham Hill on (1) the Sandstone Trail in May 2016). Most of the refinery was shut off to visitors, but I did see (5) Essar, with (4) being from 1965. They were joined by Vauxhall in 1962.

However, it seemed the canal (which, despite late Victorian optimism, hadn’t withstood rail and road, especially after being nationalised in 1948) had nothing to offer the new age, and LTC Rolt’s fears would come true. It stopped work in 1963 and at the lowest ebb, the great warehouse Telford designed burned down in 1970. Telford’s biographer, Julian Glover, called this “the greatest loss of any of his creations”.

(By this time the railway had also declined; the Whitegate Way, along which I cycled, was a working railway from 1870 to 1963 and is now a walking and cycle track).

This brought home to the townsfolk that the canal, to which they owe their town’s very existence (it was named after Ellesmere, Shropshire, on the Shropshire Union Canal, as there was no one here to give it a name before that), should be remembered. A museum was founded in 1973 and became the National Waterways Museum in 2004; this was the visit I had wanted to make for more than five years. The Island Warehouse (8,9), built in 1871, is its centrepiece and there are exhibitions such as a restoration of a boat-builder’s shed (10) and others, most of which will be dealt with in the next post. So Rolt’s fears didn’t come true and if I have anything to do with it, never will!

[hasufin]

On the third year

My friends, I just ordered tea.

Now, ordering tea is not atypical for me - I have a good relationship with a tea shop in Chinatown in SF, and Kenny’s my go-to guy for oddball Chinese teas. I don’t ask if his stuff is imported legally, he doesn’t tell me, and we’re both okay with that. I just know he can hook me up with stuff that most tea snobs are like “That’s... that’s not available in the USA.”

But I didn’t order cool specialty teas. I ordered black tea. I never just order black tea. I’ve never had to. Black tea is something I get when I go to a tea shop, and I’m buying a gift for a friend, and oh yeah how about I pick up a couple of ounces of Darjeeling for myself too. Sure, I drink black tea - but I’d always casually pick up a lot of black tea, to the extent that I had to remind myself to NOT pick up more black tea. I had plenty, going into the pandemic, is what I’m saying. Oh, and I re-use it: I get good tea and can reliably get five steeps out of it.

Which made it all the worse when last week a friend asked me if I could give her some loose leaf black tea... and I realized I’m out. Not, like, entirely out, mind. I’ve got the canister I’ve been using lately, I have some specialty flavored teas, a few ounces of a Japanese(!) black tea, and some sampler packs. But the enormous stores of black tea I thought I had stashed in my cabinet? I went through those. I gave her the sampler packs, but damn.

This is not exactly the end of the world for me: I also still have a fair bit of green and oolong teas, and of course my coffee. Come Spring I will be able to grow mint, too. It’s not a Problem. But it does hit home how very long this pandemic has lasted.

I recall when I realized we were in trouble. It was back in February 2020, when I read the transcript of Trump’s speech about how the US was responding to the “Wuhan virus”. In that speech, he talked about the quarantine centers which we all knew didn’t exist. The preparations which we knew hadn’t been made. How this would just go away, etc.. I realized - the disease was a problem, and of course the republican approach to governing (specifically, by not doing it) was incredibly inadequate.

I think the past two years have certainly proven that prediction to be horrifyingly true. The Trump administration opted to literally steal PPE from states in order to sell them at private profit. State governments dominated by republicans have actively opposed measures to contain the disease. When one parts has a core agenda of opposing the other, and the adult party stands for things like “people not dying”, you get a situation where republicans just reflexively destroy the country and then invent excuses for why that’s okay. Right now my wife and mother-in-law are discussing how Youngkin almost certainly is not going to close the schools even as children drop dead from Omicron. Hundreds of thousands of people have died at the hands of republican brinkmanship, and they show no sign of blinking even as the world crumbles around them.

So let’s talk Omicron. I’ve been Cassandraing for two years now. My own statistical models (not as hard to do as you’d think! Mine aren’t anything like as precise as the CDC’s, but good enough for most purposes) have matched theirs generally. And, well, it’s always been bad. But a friend pointed out to me that Omicron is more infectious than measles. FTR, Measles is basically the gold standard of infectivity, with an astronomical R0 of 11.

My big concern is that a disease with an R0 of 6 and a doubling rate of three days is one that has optimized to infect in an environment of functionally liitless hosts. At some point it will hit on some kind of destructive infectivity. With cholera it’s sloughing off the epithelial lining of the intestines, which dumps MASSIVE amounts of v. cholerae into the water supply... but results in severe (often lethal) dehydration. I don’t know the airborne equivalent of this, or even if there is one, but I’m worried that we’re at the point that can happen. Especially since our population is divided between people who were never willing to undergo the least inconvenience to protect others, and people who are simply exhausted from having to take responsibility for the emotional toddlers among us. So maybe it will get worse. But I could be wrong - I’m not that clever and I’m no haruspicex.

I know this pandemic has been drawn out much too long. I haven’t been downtown in two years. I haven’t been to a club, taken mass transit, or gone unmasked inside a business in all that time. The last time I went out freely, I didn’t know it would be the Last Time. But it was. Even for someone like me, who is firmly in the “merely inconvenienced” class of people, this pandemic has changed my life. I worry much more for those who are not so insulated, but there’s little to do save continue being as responsible as one can.

So. My friends, I ordered tea.

[oscopelabs]

‘America’s Not a Country, It’s Just a Business’: On Andrew Dominik’s ‘Killing Them Softly’ By Roxana Hadadi

“Shitsville.” That’s the name Killing Them Softly director Andrew Dominik gave to the film’s nameless town, in which low-level criminals, ambitious mid-tier gangsters, nihilistic assassins, and the mob’s professional managerial class engage in warfare of the most savage kind. Onscreen, other states are mentioned (New York, Maryland, Florida), and the film itself was filmed in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, though some of the characters speak with Boston accents that are pulled from the source material, George V. Higgins’s novel Cogan’s Trade. But Dominik, by shifting Higgins’s narrative 30 or so years into the future and situating it specifically during the 2008 Presidential election, refuses to limit this story to one place. His frustrations with America as an institution that works for some and not all are broad and borderless, and so Shitsville serves as a stand-in for all the places not pretty enough for gentrifying developers to turn into income-generating properties, for all the cities whose industrial booms are decades in the past, and for all the communities forgotten by the idea of progress._ Killing Them Softly_ is a movie about the American dream as an unbeatable addiction, the kind of thing that invigorates and poisons you both, and that story isn’t just about one place. That’s everywhere in America, and nearly a decade after the release of Dominik’s film, that bitter bleakness still has grim resonance.

In November 2012, though, when Killing Them Softly was originally released, Dominik’s gangster picture-cum-pointed criticism of then-President Barack Obama’s vision of an America united in the same neoliberal goals received reviews that were decidedly mixed, tipping toward negative. (Audiences, meanwhile, stayed away, with Killing Them Softly opening at No. 7 with $7 million, one of the worst box office weekends of Brad Pitt’s entire career at that time.) Obama’s first term had been won on a tide of hope, optimism, and “better angels of our nature” solidarity, and he had just defeated Mitt Romney for another four years in the White House when Killing Them Softly hit theaters on Nov. 30. Cogan’s Trade had no political components, and no connections between the thieving and killing promulgated by these criminals and the country at large. Killing Them Softly, meanwhile, took every opportunity it could to chip away at the idea that a better life awaits us all if we just buy into the idea of American exceptionalism and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ingenuity. A fair amount of reviews didn’t hold back their loathing toward this approach. A.O. Scott with the New York Times dismissed Dominik’s frame as “a clumsy device, a feint toward significance that nothing else in the movie earns … the movie is more concerned with conjuring an aura of meaningfulness than with actually meaning anything.” Many critics lambasted Dominik’s nihilism: For Deadspin, Will Leitch called it a “crutch, and an awfully flimsy one,” while Richard Roeper thought the film collapsed under the “crushing weight” of Dominik’s philosophy. It was the beginning of Obama’s second term, and people still thought things might get better.

But Dominik’s film—like another that came out a few years earlier, Adam McKay’s 2010 political comedy The Other Guys—has maintained a crystalline kind of ideological purity, and perhaps gained a certain prescience. Its idea that America is less a bastion of betterment than a collection of corporate interests, and the simmering anger Brad Pitt’s Jackie Cogan captures in the film’s final moments, are increasingly difficult to brush off given the past decade or so in American life. This is not to say that Obama’s second term was a failure, but that it was defined over and over again by the limitations of top-down reform. Ceaseless Republican obstruction, widespread economic instability, and unapologetic police brutality marred the encouraging tenor of Obama’s presidency. Donald Trump’s subsequent four years in office were spent stacking the federal judiciary with young, conservative judges sympathetic toward his pro-big-business, fuck-the-little-guy approach, and his primary legislative triumph was a tax bill that will steadily hurt working-class people year after year.

The election of Obama’s vice president Joe Biden, and the Democratic Party securing control of the U.S. Senate, were enough for a brief sigh of relief in November 2020. The $1.9 trillion stimulus bill passed in March 2021 does a lot of good in extending (albeit lessened) unemployment benefits, providing a child credit to qualifying families, and funneling further COVID-19 support to school districts after a year of the coronavirus pandemic. But Republicans? They all voted no to helping the Americans they represent. Stimulus checks to the middle-class voters who voted Biden into office? Decreased for some, totally cut off for others, because of Biden’s appeasement to the centrists in his party. $15 minimum wage? Struck down, by both Republicans and Democrats. In how many more ways can those politicians who are meant to serve us indicate that they have little interest in doing anything of the kind?

Modern American politics, then, can be seen as quite a performative endeavor, and an exercise in passing blame. Who caused the economic collapse of 2008? Some bad actors, who the government bailed out. Who suffered the most as a result? Everyday Americans, many of whom have never recovered. Killing Them Softly mimics this dynamic, and emphasizes the gulf between the oppressors and the oppressed. The nameless elites of the mob, sending a middle manager to oversee their dirty work. The poker-game organizer, who must be brutally punished for a mistake made years before. The felons let down by the criminal justice system, who turn again to crime for a lack of other options. The hitman who brushes off all questions of morality, and whose primary concern is getting adequately paid for his work. Money, money, money. “This country is fucked, I’m telling ya. There’s a plague coming,” Jackie Cogan says to the Driver who delivers the mob’s by-committee rulings as to who Jackie should intimidate, threaten, and kill so their coffers can start getting filled again. Perhaps the plague is already here.

“Total fucking economic collapse.”

In terms of pure gumption, you have to applaud Dominik for taking aim at some of the biggest myths America likes to tell about itself. After analyzing the dueling natures of fame and infamy through the lens of American outlaw mystique in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Dominik thought bigger, taking on the entire American dream itself in Killing Them Softly. From the film’s very first second, Dominik doesn’t hold back, equating an easy path of forward progress with literal trash. Discordant tones and the film’s stark, white-on-black title cards interrupt Presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s speech about “the American promise,” slicing apart Obama’s words and his crowd’s responding cheers as felon Frankie (Scoot McNairy), in the all-American outfit of a denim jacket and jeans, cuts through what looks like a shut-down factory, debris and garbage blowing around him. Obama’s assurances sound very encouraging indeed: “Each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will.” But when Frankie—surrounded by trash, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and eyes squinting shut against the wind—walks under dueling billboards of Obama, with the word “CHANGE” in all-caps, and Republican opponent John McCain, paired with the phrase “KEEPING AMERICA STRONG,” a better future doesn’t exactly seem possible. Frankie looks too downtrodden, too weary of all the emptiness around him, for that.

Dominik and cinematographer Greig Fraser spoke to American Cinematographer magazine in October 2012 about shooting in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans: “We were aiming for something generic, a little town between New Orleans, Boston and D.C. that we called Shitsville. We wanted the place to look like it’s on the down-and-down, on the way out. We wanted viewers to feel just how smelly and grimy and horrible it was, but at the same time, we didn’t want to alienate them visually.” They were successful: Every location has a rundown quality, from the empty lot in which Frankie waits for friend and partner-in-crime Russell (Ben Mendelsohn)—a concrete expanse decorated with a couple of wooden chairs, as if people with nowhere else to go use this as a gathering spot—to the dingy laundromat backroom where Frankie and Russell meet with criminal mastermind Johnny “Squirrel” Amato (Vincent Curatola), who enlists them to rob a mafia game night run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), to the restaurant kitchen where the game is run, all sickly fluorescent lights, cracked tile, and makeshift tables. Holding up a game like this, from which the cash left on the tables flows upward into the mob’s pockets, is dangerous indeed. But years before, Markie himself engineered a robbery of the game, and although that transgression was forgiven because of how well-liked Markie is in this institution, it would be easy to lay the blame on him again. And that’s exactly what Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell plan to do.

The “Why?” for such a risk isn’t that hard to figure out. Squirrel sees an opportunity to make off with other people’s money, he knows that any accusatory fingers will point elsewhere first, and he wants to act on it before some other aspiring baddie does. (Ahem, sound like the 2008 mortgage crisis to you?) Frankie, tired of the crappy jobs his probation officer keeps suggesting—jobs that require both long hours and a long commute, when Frankie can’t even afford a car (“Why the fuck do they think I need a job in the first place? Fucking assholes”)—is drawn in by desperation borne from a lack of options. If he doesn’t come into some kind of money soon, “I’m gonna have to go back and knock on the gate and say, ‘Let me back in, I can’t think of nothing and it’s starting to get cold,’” Frankie admits. And Australian immigrant and heroin addict Russell is nursing his own version of the American dream: He’s going to steal a bunch of purebred dogs, drive them down to Florida to sell for thousands of dollars, buy an ounce of heroin once he has $7,000 in hand, and then step on the heroin enough to become a dealer. It’s only a few moves from where he is to where he wants to be, he figures, and this card-game heist can help him get there.

In softly lit rooms, where the men in the frame are in focus and their surroundings and backgrounds are slightly blown out, slightly blurred, or slightly fuzzy (“Creaminess is something you feel you can enter into, like a bath; you want to be absorbed and encompassed by it” Fraser told American Cinematographer of his approach), garish deals are made, and then somehow pulled off with a sobering combination of ineptitude and ugliness. Russell buys yellow dishwashing gloves for himself and Frankie to wear during the holdup, and they look absurd—but the pistol-whipping Russell doles out to Markie still hurts like hell, no matter what accessories he’s wearing. Dominik gives this holdup the paranoia and claustrophobia it requires, revolving his camera around the barely-holding-it-together Frankie and cutting every so often to the enraged players, their eyes glancing up to look at Frankie’s face, their hands twitching toward their guns. But in the end, nobody moves. When Frankie and Russell add insult to injury by picking the players’ pockets (“It’s only money,” they say, as if this entire ordeal isn’t exclusively about wanting other people’s money), nobody fights back. Nobody dies. Frankie and Russell make off with thousands of dollars in two suitcases, while Markie is left bamboozled—and afraid—by what just happened. And the players? They’ll get their revenge eventually. You can count on that.

So it goes that Dominik smash cuts us from the elated and triumphant Russell and Frankie driving away from the heist in their stolen 1971 Buick Riviera, its headlights interrupting the inky-black night, to the inside of Jackie Cogan’s 1967 Oldsmobile Toronado, with Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” providing an evocative accompaniment. “There’s a man going around taking names/And he decides who to free, and who to blame/Everybody won’t be treated all the same,” Cash sings in that unmistakably gravelly voice, and that’s exactly what Jackie does. Called in by the mob to capture who robbed the game so that gambling can begin again, Jackie meets with an unnamed character, referred to only as the Driver (Richard Jenkins), who serves as the mob’s representative in these sorts of matters. Unlike the other criminals in this film—Frankie, with his tousled hair and sheepish face; Russell, with his constant sweatiness and dog-funk smell; Jackie, in his tailored three-piece suits and slicked-back hair; Markie, with those uncannily blue eyes and his matching slate sportscoat—the Driver looks like a square.

He is, like the men who replace Mike Milligan in the second season of Fargo, a kind of accountant, a man with an office and a secretary. “The past can no more become the future than the future can become the past,” Milligan had said, and for all the backward-looking details of Killing Them Softly—American cars from the 1960s and 1970s, that whole masculine code-of-honor thing that Frankie and Russell break by ripping off Markie’s game, the post-industrial economic slump that brings to mind the American recession of 1973 to 1975—the Driver is very much an arm of a new kind of organized crime. He keeps his hands clean, and he delivers what the ruling-by-committee organized criminals decide, and he’s fussy about Jackie smoking cigarettes in his car, and he’s so bland as to be utterly forgettable. And he has the power, as authorized by his higher-ups, to approve Jackie putting pressure on Markie for more information about the robbery. It doesn’t matter that neither Jackie nor the mob thinks Markie actually did it. What matters more is that “People are losing money. They don’t like to lose money,” and so Jackie can do whatever he needs. Dominik gives him this primacy through a beautiful shot of Jackie’s reflection in the car window, his aviators a glinting interruption to the gray concrete overpass under which the Driver’s car is parked, to the smoke billowing out from faraway stacks, and to the overall gloominess of the day.

“We regret having to take these actions. Today’s actions are not what we ever wanted to do, but today’s actions are what we must do to restore confidence to our financial system,” we hear Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson say on the radio in the Driver’s car, and his October 14, 2008, remarks are about the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008—the government bailout of banks and other financial institutions that cost taxpayers $700 billion. (Remember Will Ferrell’s deadpan delivery in The Other Guys of “From everything I’ve heard, you guys [at the Securities and Exchange Commission] are the best at these types of investigations. Outside of Enron and AIG, and Bernie Madoff, WorldCom, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers ...”) Yet the appeasing sentiment of Paulson’s words applies to Jackie, too, and to the beating he orders for Markie—a man he suspects did nothing wrong, at least not this time. But debts must be settled. Heads must roll. “Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still/Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still/Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still,” Cash sang, and Jackie is all those men, and he’ll collect the stolen golden crowns as best he can. For a price, of course. Always for a price.

“I like to kill them softly, from a distance, not close enough for feelings. Don’t like feelings. Don’t want to think about them.”

In “Bad Dreams,” the penultimate episode of the second season of The Wire, International Brotherhood of Stevedores union representative Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), having seen his brothers in arms made immaterial by the lack of work at the Baltimore ports and the collapse of their industry, learns that his years of bribing politicians to vote for expanded funding for the longshoremen isn’t going to pay off. He is furious, and he is exhausted. “We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket,” he says with the fatigue of a man who knows his time has run out, and you can draw a direct line from Bauer’s beleaguered delivery of those lines to Liotta’s aghast reaction to the horrendous beating he receives from Jackie’s henchmen. Sobotka in The Wire had no idea how he got to that helpless place, and neither does Markie in Killing Them Softly—he made a mistake, but that was years ago. Everyone forgave him. Didn’t they?

The vicious assault leveled upon Markie is a harrowing, horrifying sequence that is also unnervingly beautiful, and made all the more awful as a result of that visual splendor. In the pouring rain, Markie is held captive by the two men, who deliver bruising body shots, break his noise, batter his body against the car, and kick in his ribs. “You see fight scenes a lot in movies, but you don’t see people systematically beating somebody else. The idea was just to make it really, really, really ugly,” Dominik told the New York Times in November 2012, and sound mixer Leslie Shatz and cinematographer Fraser also contributed to this unforgettable scene. Shatz used the sound of a squeegee across a windshield to accentuate Markie’s increasingly destroyed body slumping against the car, and also incorporated flash bulbs going off as punches were thrown, adding a kind of lingering effect to the scene’s soundscape. And although the scene looks like it’s shot in slow motion, Fraser explained to American Cinematographer that the combination of an overhead softbox and dozens of background lights helped build that layered effect in which Liotta is fully illuminated while the dark night around him remains impenetrable. Every drop of rain and every splatter of blood stands out on Markie’s face as he confesses ignorance regarding the robbery and begs for mercy from Jackie’s men, but Markie has already been marked for death. When the time comes, Jackie will shoot him in the head in another exquisitely detailed, shot-in-ultrahigh-speed scene that bounces back and forth between the initial act of violence and its ensuing destruction. The cartridges flying out of Jackie’s gun, and the bullets destroying Markie’s window, and then his brain. Markie’s car, now no longer in his control, rolling forward into an intersection where it’s hit not just once, but twice, by oncoming cars. The crunching sound of Markie’s head against his windshield, and the vision of that glass splintering from the impact of his flung body, are impossible to shake.

“Cause and effect,” Dominik seems to be telling us, and Killing Them Softly follows Jackie as he cleans up the mess Squirrel, Frankie, and Russell have made. After he enlists another hitman, Mickey (a fantastically whoozy James Gandolfini, who carries his bulk like the armor of a samurai searching for a new master), whose constant boozing, whoring, and laziness shock Jackie after years of successful work together, and who refuses to do the killing for which Jackie secured him a $15,000 payday, Jackie realizes he’ll need to do this all himself. He’ll need to gather the intel that fingers Frankie, Russell, and Squirrel. He’ll need to set up a police sting to entrap Russell on his purchased ounce of heroin, violating the terms of his probation, and he’ll need to set up another police sting to entrap Mickey for getting in a fight with a prostitute, violating the terms of his probation. For Jackie, a career criminal for whom ethical questions have long since evaporated, Russell’s and Frankie’s sloppiness in terms of bragging about their score is a source of disgust. “I guess these guys, they just want to go to jail. They probably feel at home there,” he muses, and he’s then exasperated by the Driver’s trepidation regarding the brutality of his methods. Did the Driver’s bosses want the job done or not? “We aim to please,” Jackie smirks, and that shark smile is the sign of a predator getting ready to feast.

Things progress rapidly then: Jackie tracks Frankie down to the bar where he hangs out, and sneers at Frankie’s reticence to turn on Squirrel. “They’re real nice guys,” he says mockingly to Frankie of the criminal underworld of which they’re a part, brushing off Frankie’s defense that Squirrel “didn’t mean it.” “That’s got nothing to do with it. Nothing at all,” Jackie replies, and that’s the kind of distance that keeps Jackie in this job. Sure, the vast majority of us aren’t murderers. But as a question of scale, aren’t all of us as workers compromised in some way? Employees of companies, institutions, or billionaires that, say, pollute the environment, or underpay their staff, or shirk labor laws, or rake in unheard-of profits during an international pandemic? Or a government that spreads imperialism through allegedly righteous military action (referenced in Killing Them Softly, as news coverage of the economic crisis mentions the reckless rapidity with which President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001), or that can’t quite figure out how to house the nation’s homeless into the millions of vacant homes sitting empty around the country, or that refuses, over and over again, to raise the minimum wage workers are paid so that they have enough financial security to live decent lives?

Perhaps you bristle at this comparison to Jackie Cogan, a man who has no qualms blowing apart Squirrel with a shotgun at close range, or unloading a revolver into Frankie after spending an evening driving around with him. But the guiding American principle when it comes to work is that you do a job and you get paid: It’s a very simple contract, and both sides need to operate in good faith to fulfill it. Salaried employees, hourly workers, freelancers, contractors, day laborers, the underemployed—all operate under the assumption that they’ll be compensated, and all live with the fear that they won’t. Jackie knows this, as evidenced by his loathing toward compatriot Kenny (Slaine) when the man tries to pocket the tip Jackie left for his diner waitress. “For fuck’s sake,” Jackie says in response to Kenny’s attempted theft, and you can sense that if Jackie could kill him in that moment, he would. In this way, Jackie is rigidly conservative, and strictly old-school. Someone else’s money isn’t yours to take; it’s your responsibility to earn, and your employer’s responsibility to pay. Jackie cleaned up the mob’s mess, and the gambling tables opened again because of his work, and his labor resulted in their continued profits. And Jackie wants what he’s owed.

“Don’t make me laugh. ‘We’re one people.’”

We hear two main voices of authority urging calm throughout Killing Them Softly. Then-President Bush: “I understand your worries and your frustration. … We’re in the midst of a serious financial crisis, and the federal government is responding with decisive action.” Presidential hopeful Obama: “There’s only the road we’re traveling on as Americans.” Paulson speaks on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, and various news commentators chime in, too: “There needs to be consequences, and there needs to be major change.” Radio commentary and C-SPAN coverage combine into a sort of secondary accompaniment to Marc Streitenfeld’s score, which incorporates lyrically germane Big Band standards like “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” (“You work, you save, you worry so/But you can’t take your dough”) and “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (“It's a Barnum and Bailey world/Just as phony as it can be”). All of these are Dominik’s additions to Cogan’s Trade, which is a slim, 19-chapter book without any political angle, and this frame is what met so much resistance from contemporaneous reviews.

But what Dominik accomplishes with this approach is twofold. First, a reminder of the ceaseless tension and all-encompassing anxiety of that time, which would spill into the Occupy Wall Street movement, coalesce support around politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and fuel growing national interest in policies like universal health care and universal basic income. For anyone who struggled during that time—as I did, a college graduate entering the 2009 job market after the journalism industry was already beginning its still-continuing freefall—Killing Them Softly captures the free-floating anger so many of us felt at politicians bailing out corporations rather than people. Perhaps in 2012, only weeks after the re-election of Obama and with the potential that his second term could deliver on some of his campaign promises (closing Guantanamo Bay, maybe, or passing significant gun control reform, maybe), this cinematic scolding felt like medicine. But nearly a decade later, with neither of these legislative successes in hand, and with the wins for America’s workers so few and far between—still a $7.25 federal minimum wage, still no federal paid maternity and family leave act, still the refusal by many states to let their government employees unionize—if you don’t feel demoralized by how often the successes of the Democratic Party are stifled by the party’s own moderates or thoroughly curtailed by saboteur Republicans, maybe you’re not paying attention.

More acutely, then, the mutinous spirit of Killing Them Softly accomplishes something similar to what 1990’s Pump Up the Volume did: It allows one to say, with no irony whatsoever, “Do you ever get the feeling everything in America is completely fucked up?” The disparities of the financial system, and the yawning gap between the rich and the poor. The utter lack of accountability toward those who were supposed to protect us, and didn’t. And the sense that we’re always being a little bit cheated by a ruling class who, like Sobotka observed on The Wire, is always putting their hand in our pocket. Consider Killing Them Softly’s quietest moment, in which Frankie realizes that he’s a hunted man, and that the people from whom he stole would never let him live. Dominik frames McNairy tight, his expression a flickering mixture of plaintive yearning and melancholic regret, as he quietly says, “It’s just shit, you know? The world is just shit. We’re all just on our own.” A day or so later, McNairy’s Frankie will be lying on a medical examiner’s table, his head partially collapsed from a bullet to the brain, an identification tag looped around his pinky toe. And the men who ordered his death want to underpay the man who carried it out for them. Isn’t that the shit?

That leads us, then, to the film’s angriest moment, and to a scene that stands alongside the climaxes of so many other post-recession films: Chris Pine’s Toby Howard paying off the predatory bank that swindled his mother with its own stolen money in Hell or High Water, Lakeith Stanfield’s Cash Green and his fellow Equisapiens storming billionaire Steve Lift’s (Armie Hammer’s) mansion in Sorry to Bother You, Viola Davis’s Veronica Rawlings shooting her cheating husband and keeping the heist take for herself and her female comrades in Widows. So far in Killing Them Softly, Pitt has played Jackie with a certain level of remove. A man’s got to have a code, and his is fairly simple: Don’t get involved emotionally with the assignment. Pitt’s Jackie is susceptible to flashes of irritation, though, that manifest as a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and as an octave-lower growl that belies his impatience: with the Driver, for not understanding how Markie’s reputation has doomed him; with Mickey, for his procrastination and his slovenliness; with Kenny, for stealing a hardworking woman’s tip; with Frankie, when he tries to distract Jackie from killing Squirrel. Jackie is a professional, and he is intolerant of people failing to work at his level, and Pitt plays the man as tiptoeing along a knife’s edge. Remember Daniel Craig’s “’Cause it’s all so fucking hysterical” line delivery in Road to Perdition? Pitt’s whole performance is that: a hybrid offering of bemusement, smugness, and ferocity that suggests a man who’s seen it all, and hasn’t been impressed by much.

In the final minutes of Killing Them Softly, Obama has won his historic first term in the White House, and Pitt’s Jackie strides through a red haze of celebratory fireworks as he walks to meet the Driver at a bar to retrieve payment. An American flag hangs in this dive, and the TV broadcasts Obama’s victory speech, delivered in Chicago to a crowd of more than 240,000. “Crime stories, to some extent, always felt like the capitalist ideal in motion,” Dominik told the New York Times. “Because it’s the one genre where it’s perfectly acceptable for the characters to be motivated solely by money.” And so it goes that Jackie feels no guilt for the men he’s killed, or the men he’s sent away. Nor does he feel any empathy or kinship with the newly elected Obama, whose messages of unity and community he finds amusingly irrelevant. The life Jackie lives is one defined by how little people value each other, and how quick they are to attack one another if that means more opportunity—and more money—for them. Thomas Hobbes said that a life without social structure and political representation would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and perhaps that’s exactly what Jackie’s is. Unlike the character in Cogan’s Trade, Dominik’s Jackie has no wife and no personal life. But he’s surviving this way with his eyes wide open, and he will not be undervalued.

The contrast between Obama’s speech about “the enduring power of our ideas—democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope”—and Jackie’s realization that the mob is trying to underpay him for the three men he assassinated at their behest makes for a kind of nauseating, thrilling coda. He’s owed $45,000, and the envelope the Driver paid him only has $30,000 in it. Obama’s audience chanting “Yes, we can,” the English translation of the United Farm Workers of America’s slogan and the activist César Chávez’s iconic “Sí, se puede” catchphrase, adds an ironic edge to the argument between the Driver and Jackie about the value of his labor. Whatever the Driver can use to try and shrug off Jackie’s advocacy for himself, he will. Jackie’s killings were too messy. Jackie is asking for more than the mob’s usual enforcer, Dillon (Sam Shepard), who would have done a better job. Jackie is ignoring that the mob is limited to “Recession prices”—they’re suffering, so that suffering has to trickle down to someone. Jackie made the deal with Mickey for $15,000 per head, and the mob isn’t beholden to pay Jackie what they agreed to pay Mickey.

On and on, excuse after excuse, until one finally pushes Jackie over the edge: “This business is a business of relationships,” the Driver says, which is one step away from the “We’re all family here” line that so many abusive companies use to manipulate their cowed employees. And so when Jackie goes coolly feral in his response, dropping knowledge not only about the artifice of the racist Thomas Jefferson as a Founding Father but underscoring the idea that America has always been, and will always be, a capitalist enterprise first, the moment slaps all the harder for all the ways we know we’ve been let down by feckless bureaucrats like the Driver, who do only as they’re told; by faceless corporate overlords like the mob, issuing orders to Jackie from on high; and by a broader country that seems like it couldn’t care less about us. “I’m living in America, and in America, you’re on your own … Now fucking pay me” serves as a kind of clarion call, an expression of vehemence and resentment, and a direct line into the kind of anger that still festers among those continuously left behind—still living in Shitstown, still trying to make a better life for themselves, and still asking for a little more respect from their fellow Americans. For all of Killing Them Softly’s ugliness, for all its nihilism, and for all its commentary on how our country’s ruthless individualism has turned chasing the American dream into a crippling addiction we all share, that demand for dignity remains distressingly relevant. Maybe it’s time to listen.

[fmdtaeyong]

taeyong through titan’s eras

titan’s maknae, main vocal, and lead dancer taeyong over the course of his almost eleven-year career, from debut at age 15 to the present, at age 25. from the maknae of that new bc boy group to an artist in his own right (who has very little interest in being in said bc boy group).

headcanon: ash through the (titan) years

2011: in titan’s debut year, ash was just glad to be there. he hadn’t anticipated debuting with as much responsibility as he had as a main vocal and lead dancer. he was unsure of himself during these years and it was noticeable. ash had practically been born with confidence on stage, but when he got on stage with titan, he took his training about not standing out too much to heart too much. he liked the music they were doing at the time, but then again, he was approaching it with optimism instead of the pessimism he holds towards titan’s music today. he couldn’t relate to the emotions he was singing about in btd and be mine and ash’s strength is emoting emotions he can deeply connect to, not acting out emotions he’s never experienced. if he stood out during titan’s first year, it was only because of the prominence he had in their music vocally and the embarrassing korean stumbles he would make during tv appearances.

2012: titan only had one korean release during 2012, which gave ash time to train to work on himself. titan had blown up already by this point and it was a lot of pressure to handle so soon in ash’s career, being only sixteen at this time. he was still struggling with being the baby of the group at this point because though his baby face helped him stand out as the youngest in appearance, he still had little interest in acting the cute maknae role.

2013: seventeen at this point, ash was ready to be seen as an adult and treated like one, despite not being one. he’d begun to settle more into the quiet and mysterious niche of his at this point, which meant he felt more pressure to stand out in performances in order to prove he had a purpose in the group. the fame titan had solidified for themselves brought with it a critical eye on each performance they did and ash hadn’t enjoyed what tastes of criticism he’d already had. anyway. ash singing literally like 40% of the lines and center time in fanfare while even the other main vocals got like 10% each.......................... you know he got eaten alive by the other members’ akgaes!

2014: this was the busiest year of titan’s career based on pure comeback frequency. it was also the year ash came of age, meaning all titan members were adults now. ash perceives it that their comebacks this year were a little sexier than before, although it’s more obvious in the following year. he was coming into his own as a performer this year, though he’d also begun to grow bored of their sound. ash would like the him acting in titan’s mvs agenda to end by this point tho <3

2015: call me baby and love me right leaned further into sexy concepts than anything titan had done previously. he assumes bc didn’t predict his maknae innocence going down the drain in a scandal and that that has to do with moving from the angst of a group with teenagers to the sauve and sexy image titan assumes around this time, but it’s convenient. he got to show his versatility as a vocalist as he was praised just as much for how his voice matched their shift in style as he had been in their old style. sing for you was sentimental instead of sexy and is one of ash’s favorite titan releases. if you really forced him to answer, ash would say 2015 was titan’s peak musically.

2016: this is the point when ash starts to decide he’s tired of titan and doesn’t plan to renew. the whole sexy toxic guy thing isn’t new for titan, but he’s made several snide remarks to this day about how much he doesn’t support the romanticizing of the lyrics of monster. this was the year they solidified the image they have today and was arguably their last year as the indisputable top before polaris started to present themselves as serious competition. ash was receiving a lot of hate around this time, so on top of not connecting to the music at the time, 2016 is one of the years in titan’s career he views most negatively.

2017: #freeash. he likes neither kokobop nor power and considers them two of the weakest releases in titan’s discography, so the year was saved only by the release of his favorite titan title track, universe. since he debuted solo at the end of 2017, this was ash’s last year fully dedicated to the group, if you could even call it that when he was under the impression it’d be his last year in titan until the last moment. universe would have been a great disbandment song to go out on, he’s gotta say...

2018: ash was more focused on establishing his solo career than anything else this year. he wasn’t very attached to either release this year or titan as a whole. 2018 was really the beginning of him detaching from the group in favor of solo activities.

2019: ah, the return of the six toxic sexy boys <3 bad sort of hits, but he’s got bigger problems to worry about this year than how catchy titan’s music is. ankle injury and his disinterest in titan taken into consideration, ash was more engaged in titan’s performances than you might expect he was, but it didn’t stop the anti-driven narrative that he was completely phoning it in. obsession reminds ash to be grateful that his stylists sometimes let him not be as naked as some of the other titan members.

2020: ash only really participated in “now or never” promotions this year. song-wise and career-wise for titan it was fine... nothing life-changing. they’re past their ultimate peak now and that’s more than fine for ash.

2021: someone forgot to remind titan’s stylists that ash would like to keep his tits covered </3 again, ash is pretty indifferent towards titan’s releases in 2021. they’re getting repetitive without much to stand out, in ash’s opinion, but that’s what happens after a decade in the industry, so ash isn’t writing strongly worded letters to bc’s a&r department.

[academla]

Guys, I made it!

Wow, it’s crazy to be back on here. I don’t know if anyone still follows me and/or remembers I exist, at this point. I came here because I finally let go of my domain name. It was a really difficult decision which felt like leaving a part of my life behind me and closing a chapter, but I don’t use this blog enough anymore to justify the cost. 

I created this blog over FIVE years ago. It’s associated with so many memories - primarily good, but also some of the shittiest times of my life. Regardless, my time in the studyblr community was pretty formative and I’m so glad I was able to experience it. I have zero regrets and never will.

Even though I’m leaving it behind indefinitely, my blog will forever be a part of me. I’m still getting emails and some comments on the fanfic that somehow stirred up controversy and drama in 2017, I actually sent The Academic Zine to one of my account leads at work the other day, and in my interview for my current job I talked a lot about how running my blog influenced and reflected who I am, my strengths as well as my weaknesses. I’m still in touch with the company that reached out to me about collaborating on a self-help book so you never know... maybe someday the stars will align and that will pan out!

This is more for my own closure than anything (so please forgive my rambling) but I know I have periodically come here and posted brief updates. If I recall correctly, they are usually also associated with empty promises/declarations of an inevitable return, which I can safely say is most likely not going to happen anytime soon.

Hard to believe I had just graduated high school when I first joined. To those who still remember me and my journey - trying to juggle mental health, school, and paying my way through college - here’s a final (for now... I’ll probably be on here in another 5 years when all the people I used to follow are like, getting married and having babies LOL) update on my achievements in the past year or so. I’m by no means perfect and I have a long but exciting road ahead of me, but put in the context of the person I was even 2 years ago, I would say with cautious optimism and pride that I did indeed make it.

Updates below, in case you aren’t reeling enough from the wall of text that just unexpectedly popped up on your dash...

- I graduated summa cum laude from the honors college in May 2020 with my psychology BS and the 4.0 GPA that my mental health sometimes seemed destined to make an impossible achievement. Even in the end I had to take an Incomplete for one of my courses because I was unfortunately in the midst of a relapse. This shit is real, guys. But even in spite of it, I was able to succeed.

- I paid for 6 out of all 8 semesters, as was my goal all along - through working my ass off and trying to be somewhat responsible with money. Donations I received through here were a massive help as well and I’ll be forever grateful for each and every person who contributed. I also applied for and received a few merit scholarships, which helped. I graduated with $15k of debt, which is less than half the national average. So, I did pretty well for myself.

- I’ve undergone some tough mental health challenges and hurdles. Some of the darkest times I’ve ever sustained, where I was scared for/of myself and was so much worse than I was when I was 15 yet had so fewer resources. Somehow I made it through - and will continue to. I made that pledge in 2015 and I still stand by it.

- I’m now working for a market research company. I knew by graduation that I didn’t want to be in academia, but I didn’t know if I had enough passion/commitment to a clinical career to undergo the financial, mental, and academic burden of a graduate program. I had a minor existential crisis over that all summer. Fortuitously, I emailed one of my favorite psychology professors from my freshman year and her son-in-law was able to refer me to this market research company. Everything came together and I love my job more than ANYTHING. Work is (most of the time) incredibly fun and something I look forward to every day. 

- EDITED TO ADD: I’m also living on my own in the city, hooray! I thought the day would never come, but luckily it did. It’s painfully expensive (because city) but for the amenities, location, and quality of the 1-bedroom apartment relative to many other options I looked at, it’s worth it. We can reassess whether or not I’m broke in August when the lease is up.

Listen, I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve dealt with a lot of adversity and trauma, too. And at the same time I am fortunate: I was raised in a (mostly) loving household, I was afforded educational opportunities that not everyone is lucky enough to have, I was able to get the help and support I needed when I was unsafe. I won’t invalidate my own struggles because the hard work I’ve invested, the literal blood, sweat, and tears, all of that - that was real and valid. But I don’t take a single thing for granted.

I made it, and you can too. If you are a stranger wondering who the hell I am, you can go here if you want to be assaulted by a wall of text, or here for a more concise and recently updated synopsis.

That’s all I’ll say for now (did anyone miss my novel-length posts?) but I do still manage my email address (academlastudyblr@gmail.com) if for any reason anyone is looking to connect. 

Just for the hell of it, I’m also updating some of my pages. Catch you (I’m talking into a void right now, I know) on the flip side!

[ofclaires]

IV. CLAIRE WALSH

PAST SELF PARAS: april 2020 / september 2020 / march 2021. 

hi, before the read more i just wanted to say THANK YOU. getting to play claire has been absolutely a treat, a challenge, and genuinely, a huge part of my life for the past year and a half or so. it occurred to me when writing this and looking back at other things i’ve written for claire that i didn’t just feel like i was writing this for myself or for claire ; but i was writing it for you guys, too ! that has been one of the most special things about gallagher for me is the writing community that i feel like we built, taking such a huge investment in our characters and everyone else’s writing. i feel like i’m writing with and for some of my best friends. i also feel like i’ve grown so much ( ok, i actually don’t just feel like it, i can look back at those three paras and SEE how my writing has improved. ) i am so blessed to have gotten to write claire with all of you and to share her story, i feel like she has been so fucking beloved & it’s given her so much life. i am so proud of her and it’s really bittersweet that i’m finally saying goodbye to her as well. so, thank you all so, so much, gallagher has been a writing experience like no other for me & i love you all ! 

trigger warnings : domestic violence & abuse, death

PART ONE: CHILDHOOD.

The trailer that Claire spent the back half of her childhood in never felt like home. Maybe because trailers are made to be temporary, or the fact that if she accepted that this was where she belonged, she’d have to give up hope.

It’s normal Maggie Walsh to be out late, Claire’s usually cleaned up the kitchen and tucked herself into bed by the time her mother comes in the door – but she’s not sleeping. She’s always had trouble with that, brain bouncing around from one thought to the next until eventually she hears the creak of the door.

Her mom’s home.

She hears the usual stumbling, the clatter of dishes falling from where she’d neatly placed them on the drying rack. Maggie’s drunk, Claire’s sure of that. Ten years old and she knows what it means to be so drunk that you can hardly see straight, that the words you say under the influence are a different reflection from the person that you really are. She inhales deeply and crawls out from under the covers to check on her. Ten years old and she knows the steps: Help her take her makeup off, make sure she sleeps on her side, glass of water on the bedside table, trash can on the floor. Maggie is only twenty-six years old herself now, not done with her childhood by the time that Claire was born, not ready to be a mother. Claire’s had to figure it out most of it herself.

“Mom?” Claire knocks on the door lightly, plastic cup full of water already in hand.

“Don’t – don’t come in!” Maggie sputters, and Claire’s confused. She defies her request and opens the bedroom door the rest of the way. When she sees her mom, she drops the cup on the floor, small hands curling into fists.

“What happened? Who did that to you?”

“I told you not to come in here, Claire,” Maggie repeats, but Claire has always been on to disregard commands. She learns at a young age that authority only means older than you or some assigned title, not that they know best.

“Who did that? Why?” She repeats her questions. Despite being mature for her age, it’s hard for Claire to wrap her head around the black eye obscuring Maggie’s face, and the swelling on her cheek.

“It doesn’t matter,” Maggie sighs, dejected as she flops down on the bed. Even in her state, she knows that there’s not much use telling Claire to back off or go away once she’s decided that she’s not going to. Her little girl is a spitfire, strangely enough reminds Maggie a lot of her own mom, like living with a miniature version of her. Maybe that’s why Claire wins most arguments. “Come here.”

Claire walks closer to the bed, kicking the cup aside on her way for no reason other than to kick something. She crawls into bed next to her mom and looks up at her, waiting for more of an explanation or literally anything but silence. 

“I don’t know why I keep looking for a happy ending. I leave you home alone, I come home like this...not helping either of us,” Maggie presses a kiss to the top of Claire’s head, runs her fingers through her daughter’s hair. It’s so soft and Claire is so little, she can’t help but look at the spilled cup on the floor with a pang of guilt. “I’m sorry,” she adds, voice choked up and words a little slurred. Tears squeeze out of the corners of her eyes when she closes them, hugging her daughter closer, “I’ve blamed you for my fucked up life for so long...that’s not fair.”

Now, Claire is only ten, but those are the kind of words that you remember forever. Still, she smiles. “It doesn’t have to stay fucked up. It can get better,” a childish spark of optimism in her heart that hasn’t yet been put out. It makes Maggie smile back though, kissing her daughter on the top of her head yet again.

“I like that,” she says, and they fall asleep curled up beside each other. Claire sleeps soundly, thinking that it’s possible. Things really could get better, and for a while, it seems like there really is a sort of shift. Maggie starts cooking, cleaning again, and she doesn’t even stay out so late. That’s when she meets Martin.

He seems better than the rest. Until he isn’t.

But Claire does her job as her mother’s protector, just as she’s been doing all of her life, and it’s that event that jumpstarts the rest of everything that happens next.

PART TWO: GRADUATION.

Claire’s come to the formal conclusion that graduation ceremonies are a waste of time. There’s all this build up, everyone’s so excited, and then you have to sit around and wait for your name to be called so you can spend two seconds walking across a stage while everyone claps. She would have skipped it entirely if her mother hadn’t already come up, and if she knew that people were going to insist. The small talk afterward is even more agonizing than the ceremony itself. It is sort of painful saying goodbye to everyone, and it occurs to Claire that there’s more people that she’s going to miss than she ever expected.

“Callum and his mother are here,” Maggie points out.

“And?” Claire rolls her eyes. Seeing Callum again to begin with had brought up a lot of old feelings, and generally, even though they’d resolved things, she tries to avoid him whenever possible.

“Well, it’s probably weird if we don’t say hello, at least, right? I’m going to say hello,” Maggie interjects, “he’s such a sweet boy.”

Claire’s eyebrows rise on her forehead as she crosses her arms over her chest. “Go ahead then,” she sighs, “I’ll wait right here.”

“Claire,” Maggie draws out her name with a withering stare, but Maggie has never been able to establish that sort of authority with Claire that would prompt any inclination of obedience, so Claire just shrugs her shoulders, unimpressed. She’s not going to budge. “Fine, I’ll be right back.”

Claire’s done her best to put the chapter of their life that includes Martin out of her mind when rekindling things with her mother, and she certainly doesn’t want to stand around making small talk with his other ex-wife, trying not to look at Callum with his matching jawline, trying not to remember everything she hates. It all comes back in a flash. The horrible cracking sound that her mother’s head had made when it connected with the wall, the blood on the marble floor. They say you don’t remember trauma properly, that your memory doesn’t work quite right, but she will never forget the way her fist connected with Martin’s face : like a puzzle piece, like it BELONGED there, and she’d done it over and over again until she heard sirens.

And yet, Claire can’t deny that it’s a part of her life that got her here, where she is today. She thinks life is shitty and random, and that not everything has to happen ‘for a reason.’ Still, she’ll catch Kass’s eye across the room and see her smiling so brightly that it seems impossible not to believe in something. Claire can’t help herself anyway – she smiles back. No one has ever been able to produce Claire’s smile in its truest form the way Kass has, unashamed of being so happy to look at someone. She once thought the idea of looking at a person and seeing your whole future was ridiculous, that you’d have to be stupid to put that much of yourself into someone, but it isn’t like that at all. All of it was unintentional, like by the time she realized it, Kass was already everything. And she feels so safe with that thought that she doesn’t mind at all.

“Am I interrupting something?” A figure steps in front of her, cutting off her line of sight. She’s not really fond of being snuck up on, so she opens her mouth to say something snarky when she’s met with the gaze of Lisanna Harlin, one of last year’s mentors. Her daughter, Elisa, is there, but she’s not graduating, so Claire’s confused by Lisanna’s presence.

“No, Ms. Harlin,” Claire says, though there’s a spark of indignation in her words that practically goes hand in hand whenever an adult commands authority.

“Lisanna is fine,” she says with a light laugh, like she’s amused Claire’s greeted her this way.

“Can I...help you with something?” Claire asks, mostly curious about how long this interaction has gone on. While she’s friendly with Elisa, she was Kass’s roommate last year, they’re not exceedingly close, so she’s not sure what else Lisanna would have to say to her other than maybe a polite hello.

It’s more than a polite hello. Lisanna Harlin works for Lexon Corp in Durham, North Carolina, a private military company that provides armed guards, bodyguards, and guns for hire. They’re the sort of place that would be looking for the best of the best in combat, and they have a bit of a reputation for hiring Gallagher girls. Claire had given up on the job search months ago since the video went out, in fact, she’s had a job lined up for graduation already : at a boxing gym in D.C., where the scene isn’t too bad. It was suited to her, but not exactly the sort of thing that her Gallagher education had prepared her for. Lexon Corp? Everything her rigorous love of January boot camps were tailored to. And they want to interview her.

A month later, Claire’s sitting on the cusp of a completely fresh start. It wasn’t easy to backtrack on the plans that she and Kass had made together, knowing how much was changing for the both of them, it had been nice to have the stable idea of an apartment together on the horizon. Now, she’s a four hour drive away, and she goes home to her one-bedroom studio in Durham after rigorous training throughout the day. But she’s grateful for the chance to work her way back into the field, and she can remember what Lisanna said to her when they gave her the offer.

“We’re aware that with your history that we’re taking a chance on you, Claire,” Lisanna said. “But we think the reasons that made other agencies look past you are exactly what makes you an asset. You care about your jobs, the people that you’re involved in, and you’d have a partner’s back until the bitter end. You listen to your intuition, trust your gut...and above all else, you have follow-through. I’m excited to be able to offer this position. Don’t prove me wrong.”

Claire swears that she won’t.  

PART THREE: KIPTYN.

Kiptyn isn’t supposed to be in the left hall closet. 

In fact, he’s not supposed to be awake at all. But who can sleep the night before their birthday anyway? Sure, he’ll be thirteen, and that’s probably old enough to have gotten over the magic of it all, but...he’d still been lying awake with excitement, the anticipation keeping his eyes open for hours on end. Well, that and the video game he’d been playing under the covers, but he’d obviously only been playing it because he couldn’t sleep in the first place.

Then he started thinking about the left hall closet and the conversation that they had at dinner the other night. In Kiptyn’s defense, Dahvia – his younger sister – had totally started it and he was an innocent bystander. After all, Kiptyn’s old enough to know that they don’t bring up Claire to mom, because it just puts her in a mood and then you can forget about doing anything else for the rest of the evening. But Dahvia’s ten, practically a baby, and she doesn’t know any better.

“Hey, mom? What sort of accident did Claire die in? Nina asked me at recess and I didn’t know,” Dahvia pipes up, before she’s even properly sat down. Kip visibly cringes. He’s older, wiser, knows this won’t go well. Still, he dares to look at his mom’s face and he notes the faraway look in her eye, like she seems to experience a bunch of things at once. Kip notices how even though her eyes are glassy, she doesn’t cry. Though sometimes, their mom will just cry randomly, like two weeks ago when he asked for help with his Spanish homework and she couldn’t even help him finish the first worksheet.

“It was a car accident,” she says stiffly, “eat your dinner.”

Kiptyn kicks his sister under the table and flashes her a look that says : Great. Look what you did, ruined dinner. Dahvia sticks her tongue out at him.

So, he knows that he’s not supposed to be in the left hall closet because he could ruin many more dinners, but he’s here anyway. He’s been thinking about it ever since they sat in silence for the rest of that half hour, and he’s come to the conclusion – his mother was lying. Because all sorts of things make their mother cry, like a bowl of mac and cheese or Spanish class, or motorcycles, and she won’t let Kiptyn take boxing lessons though his friend Robert is and he thought it sounded really cool, but she doesn’t have any problem with cars or driving, and also, she’s never told them a single thing about Claire except that. They aren’t allowed to know anything about her, especially not anything true, so Kiptyn is pretty sure that’s a lie. There’s just something just weird about it.

So, in the middle of the night before his thirteenth birthday, he looks up a video on how you pick locks and then he figures it out on the door of the left hall closet. He’s there for at least forty-five minutes, practically ready to give it all up when he hears the clicking sound, and then it opens. His first thought is : Woah. This is a load of junk.

And he’s right. There’s boxes upon boxes of paperwork, old clothes. Some things start to click, like when he finds a pair of worn boxing gloves with Claire’s initials embroidered on them. His favorite thing that he finds is the fattest scrapbook he’s ever seen – his mom always makes them, there’s one for every year of his life. Dahvia’s too, they love looking at them. The cover of this one, though, says Italy 2021. It’s all pictures of his mom and Claire, probably in their early twenties. Kiptyn mostly notices his mother’s smile, how he’s only seen her look like that a couple times in his life and yet it looks so EASY here, like she wears it all the time. It’s so strange to him. He sets the scrapbook down and crawls toward the back of the closet. His eyes land on two leather folders with gold embroidery, and he opens up the first one. In big letters at the top : GALLAGHER ACADEMY.

It’s a diploma.

This certifies that Kassandra Sutton has satisfactorily completed the…

“What are you doing?”

Kiptyn yells out like a child, not having heard anyone creeping up on him. He claps his hand over his mouth as if to shush himself. “The door was open! I don’t know how, but I just...noticed it was open and wanted to make sure that...no one was stealing your stuff!” he grins sheepishly, hoping that he can ride on the high of his birthday week to get him out of this one.

“It was just...open?” his mother looks down at him with raised eyebrows before brandishing a twisted paper clip between two fingers. The one that had formerly been stuck in the door. His guilty expression widens, he can’t help it.

“Okay, I might know how it opened,” Kiptyn admits. He hesitates for a moment, before he realizes that he’s ALREADY in trouble, he might as well just come out with it and pray to the birthday gods. He holds up the diploma with her name on it : “What’s Gallagher Academy?”

Kass’s sigh is heavy and deep, accompanied by the amount of exhaustion that comes with raising two curious kids by herself. After Claire died, she moved her family to London to be closer to their aunt and away from everything that reminded her of Claire. She never told her children why. From hiding that world from them, the world that took so many people from her : her father, her ex-girlfriend, and the love of her life. She swore that she would never lose her children to it, too. But Kiptyn looks up at her with wide eyes, desperate to know about his mother and his past, and Kass also knows what it’s like to have part of yourself missing due to family secrets that are being kept from you. He is practically a teenager now. So, she relents.

Kass doesn’t go into all of the details, of course. Just that Gallagher Academy was a school for spies, and that’s where it all started. Kiptyn already knew that his moms met in college, so it’s the spy part that’s most interesting to him. She talks about Claire with a light in her eyes he’s unfamiliar with, how she was one of the best fighters in their year, that she grew up with such a talent in the ring that she probably could’ve gone pro if her life had gone in a different direction. She talks about how they had to part ways after graduation, because Claire got a job in North Carolina and she got a job in Washington, DC, but they made it work, and both got very accustomed to the four hour drive – though it was sometimes closer to three for Claire, because she always drove too fast, even on this big, black motorcycle which Kass swears that she hated. She tells Kiptyn about how they got married, the way she’d almost moved to England for a dream job and that long distance threatened to drive them apart again – until Claire chased her down in the airport with a ring and proposal.  

She also talks about how Claire really died : the abridged version. It was an overseas mission where they’d been cornered, and Claire risked her life to save the rest of their team. There were no other casualties, and the information they were able to bring back helped stop the terrorist organization they’d been chasing to end them for good. Kass tells the abridged version for her son, gives Claire a hero’s death. In some ways, it was. She doesn’t mention the ways that Claire was consumed by the case, it was an organization hellbent on killing spies and it likely reminded her of the brotherhood. Kass had been worried about the case the whole time, because it felt like Claire was taking it too personally. In the end, she may have been right : because Claire had let it take her life in order to close it. She also doesn’t mention that such a sacrificial death means that her wife died fighting alone, swinging her fists until her very last breath. But still, she was all alone.

She had no choice but to take her kids as far away from that life as possible.

Kiptyn tries, but he doesn’t really remember Claire. He’d only been three years old when she passed away, and before then, she’d been so consumed by her last case that she was barely present. Still, he thinks she sounds badass.

He falls asleep on his mother’s shoulder that night, looking through the scrapbook of pictures from their trip to Italy in 2021. He’s animated for the first part, pointing out buildings and asking questions, wonders if Claire was sweating in all that leather, but he slowly starts to drift off. He wakes up on the couch the next morning, no trace of the book or any of the other papers he’d hauled out of the closet the night before. He looks at the closet and there’s an extra padlock. Figures.

It comes up in little ways, like a private joke that he has with his mother, like she’ll say something and flash him a secretive smile. He likes that, and he understands that this is a big secret that he has to keep. It doesn’t come up again until his fourteenth birthday the next year, the summer before high school. It’s a strange letter in a manila envelope, sealed with some expensive red wax, his name written in fancy calligraphy. The most attention-grabbing part, however, is not Kiptyn Sutton-Walsh in big cursive letters. It’s the return address :

GALLAGHER ACADEMY.

learn her skills, honor her sword. keep her secrets.

[strwberrytae]

So Long, Farewell, and Goodbye For Now -

“I don’t know how you are so familiar to me—or why it feels less like I am getting to know you and more as though I am remembering who you are. How every smile, every whisper brings me closer to the impossible conclusion that I have known you before, I have loved you before—in another time, a different place, some other existence.”     - Lang Leav

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Hello, You ♡ Yes, You. You ethereal, beautiful being. I am writing to you with bittersweet yet wonderful news - depending on the perspective. I am writing this post to inform all of you that I will no longer be writing for this blog for the foreseeable future. What I mean by that is that I am not giving up writing forever, no. But my life has changed so much over the last two years, I do not see myself writing again for quite some time. But don’t worry! I will be back!

Below the Read More section, I have poured my heart and soul into the real reasons why I’ve made this decision. I warn you, it’s lengthy but it’s everything that has led up to this over the years. So, if you fancy, have a read. If not, I bid you farewell and wish you all the happiness in the world. Thank you for supporting me so far. I truly appreciate it and love you all very dearly. Now, if you wish to read it at a later time, I will have a link available on my page at all times for anyone who is curious. It’s a hell of a story if you ask me ~

Edit: Made by Me - also, a surprise photo at the end Warnings/Triggers: Talks of emotional abuse, depression, and suicide but also happiness and love -

When I first started this blog, it was 2016. I had been on Tumblr for over a decade now but BTS led me to writing passionately for 2 years. I was incredibly active and utterly consumed by this website. Not just for the writing, but I was so obsessed because of my friends and mutuals that I made along the way. Can I just say that I’ve met some incredible people on this platform - including my best friend and soulmate? Truthfully, the absolute best friend I have ever had. But more importantly, Tumblr was my greatest escape. I mean this website truly has been my saving grace through very dark times.

In that part of my life, I was in an extremely toxic relationship; by then, it was 6 years I was with him. He was emotionally abusive, had such a short-fuse temper, hated everyone I knew which led me never really seeing any of my friends after college, knew I was anorexic and did nothing to stop me, knew I had depression since we started dating and always argued it as if it wasn’t real, crushed my dreams and ambitions, mocked potential suicide attempts, expected me to just abandon all hope to ever leave home to explore someplace new or get a job that I actually love. He was...just the worst. Never hit me though, so I’m grateful for that. But sometimes I wish he would so it would have given me the voice I needed to get out of that relationship much sooner than I did. But regardless, because of him plus having a soul-sucking job that wore me down to the core, Tumblr was my escape. BTS was my escape.

I fell hard and I fell deep. I created a fantasy world within this world. All of my dreams, fantasies, desires, and hopes were poured into my writing. My imagination was running wild. My activity was through the roof because I was always on here day in and out, just pretending like the outside world didn’t exist. It consumed me...but I needed it. Looking back, it was pretty excessive. At the time, I seemed perfectly normal because everyone else was just as active and saying the same things and doing the same things. I felt a belonging, like I fit in.

But I hated the person I became. It took me getting yelled at, mocked, ridiculed, and belittled by my ex to snap me out of that illusion I built and back into reality. That was the roughest night that we had filled with lots of screaming on his end and crying on my part. He thought my obsession was sick. He thought it was disgusting. It all started because he found fake texts I had made with Jimin and Tae. Don’t recall the story it was a part of but he thought they were texts with the actual members… In my eyes, I should get credit for making them look so legit but he didn’t see it that way. He thought fangirling over men was essentially cheating. No matter how hard I tried to explain, he didn’t understand. But a part of his view was right. I learned that I was a bit too much into it and I really needed to take a step back from Tumblr for a while. So I did. I deactivated my account and disappeared for months. Also because he made me and threatened our relationship if I didn’t. Should have taken the out but ah well.

Just two months prior to this incident, I attempted suicide. Well, contemplated. Everything was planned out. Bought a hotel room for Thanksgiving night as I was working a super late shift until about 1-2am. My commute home was an hour long and I still had to come back to work at 7am. So I got a room. Brought a large amount of pills with me and I was going to call it. No notes written to friends, family, or loved ones. Nothing. I was done. Didn’t think anyone would miss me. I just figured the world would keep turning without me. I had thought about doing this several times before but this was my first time making plans for it. It was my lowest of the low. But then I met someone that night that changed my life entirely just in a 10 minute interaction of talking - nothing special. We’ll get to that later. But this person just gave me hope and to this day, I still can’t explain it. It was euphoric. I felt clarity. It was in that night that I thought I might hold out just a little bit longer.

And thus @strwberrytae was born - but it was far from the same. At first, I restarted the blog in secret. Why would I do this? Why would a 25 year old open a blog in secret? Well, two months after the awful fight, my ex proposed to me and I said yes. I know. Believe me, I know. I was scared. My depression was getting worse again. I no longer had an escape except for books. All I did was read so I had some sort of reality to be in besides my own. But returning to a brand new blog did not give the same satisfaction as returning to an old blog.

I worked so hard on my first blog and this redo, I tried to consider it as a gift. Perhaps this was a chance to start anew and rebrand myself. This optimism kept up for quite some time. Slowly, I added my favorite past works then added some new chapters. If you’ve been here with me since 2017, you would know that my appearance on Tumblr was still not the same. Then I got married in October.

An empty, loveless marriage that I regret to this day. Needless to say, my writing and activity on Tumblr was still practically non-existent as I was still too scared of getting caught. Even though he finally gave me permission to use it again because he could tell how miserable it was making me. Yes, gave me permission. Thankfully, it all ended after a year. I finally went to a therapist even though I hated them so much and all past therapists I had. She was pretty great. Within five sessions, I summoned the courage to break up with this guy. I was finally set free. Nearly 9 years together and I finally felt like I could breathe.

Unfortunately, although I was free, I had to live with the guy for about 5 months after the breakup. Which was beyond rough, believe me. Imagine someone writhing in pain and bawling their eyes out and venting non-stop about all of their faults and wrongdoings every single day. At the end of the day, as shitty as he was to me, he was my best friend too. We went through a lot of shit together and he did have some good sides to him too. So witnessing this was horrendous. Needless to say, I wasn’t getting much privacy either. Writing was not my top priority. Now it’s 2019 and things changed drastically for the better - and worst.

Remember the person I met in 2016 on Thanksgiving night? Well, that person is someone I crushed on every since that night. For 2 years. People, I’m telling you. He did absolutely nothing special that night. He didn’t flirt with me. He didn’t check me out. He didn’t do anything remotely to make a girl swoon but I was so drawn to him. The only word that could describe it was “cosmic” - beautifully cosmic. 

Well in January 2019, 2 months following my break up, he came into my store one day. And my god did he look incredible. He was dressed head to toe in black - a fitted black suit at that. He even wore this long, designer jacket to match. Hair shaved on the sides with beautiful, thick dark hair on top. So tall - 182cm. A smile that could kill; quite literally. The canines are on point. He looked like a five course meal. That day, he definitely flirted with me. By the end of the week, we had our first date. Sadly, I also lost my job in the same week and was unemployed for a year because no one would hire me. I was laid off and one of my seniors took my job. Of course, they needed to keep me around for the holidays and then give me the boot. I was devastated. I hated that job so much as it only aided in fueling my depression but losing it was definitely an amazing thing. And! I survived on my savings and definitely didn’t spend my time writing. I had life to sort out last year - like from the ground up. No worries though. I got a job in February 2020 and I love it, so it’s all good, baby. Now I’m in the health field and feel like I’m actually helping people, which I love.

Now, here we are 2 years later and I’m engaged to the man.  Someone who makes me smile everyday, believes in me, encourages me, let’s me be 100% myself, travels with me, taught me how to love myself, taught me to accept my body, gets me on a level that only my best friend could, and someone who goes above and beyond every single day to show me how much he loves me. Bonus, he welcomes my love for BTS with open arms, reads my writing, AND has even been sucked in himself to the fandom. Jungkook and Jimin, look out. You got another fanboy. I thought true love was impossible for me but I was very, very wrong.

He has shown me that I can be happy and I have finally experienced true happiness. When people ask how I’m doing, I don’t cringe and lie through my teeth. I smile and say that I am doing well because by George, I am. Everyone around me has seen me over the last two years and made the comment, “you look so much happier”. They meet him and swoon just as much as I do. Is he perfect? No, he’s not. He has flaws just like everyone else but he actually grows and learns from his mistakes to better himself. That’s what amazes me the most. Even if we argue, which is seldom, he refuses to let it go without resolution so we can always fix whatever the issue is. As we like to call it, we’re in-sync. In everything, we’re always so in-sync. I’m wildly in love, my dudes.

So, why am I not writing anymore? To put it simply, I’m happy and don’t really feel the desire to write anymore - at least not fanfiction. Even when I was super young, like elementary school, I used writing as an outlet for my dark escape. I wrote poetry primarily and by middle school, it turned to fanfiction for Supernatural, Simple Plan, and Panic! At The Disco. Along with a very long list of other bands and shows but anyways. I’ve been severely depressed since I was 15 and fanfiction put me in this hole that I couldn’t get out of. I relied on this method to help me get through all the bad shit I was dealing with. It was my coping mechanism.

Now? While depression never truly goes away as the lovely disease that it is, I am genuinely happy. Because of this, when I opened all of my past works and works in progress, I felt nothing but guilt. Guilt for not keeping up with my chapters or keeping my account active. I felt dread to have to escape in this world that I had created. I felt no joy or excitement. It was the strangest feeling that happened all in a matter of seconds. Thus leading to my final decision to take a step away from writing. Do I still love it? Absolutely. But now I think I’m going to re-route and focus my writing on what I love - reality. I’m going to get back into journaling and write essays about love and beauty as I’ve always loved to do. But for escaping into a fantasy world? I don’t know when I’ll be back.

Now I know what you’re thinking. “But you can write and be happy!” Nah fam. Writing has been my aid through dark times and now I mostly associate it with those dark times. And for once in my life, I feel this desire to enjoy reality and remain in it - with the exception of journaling here and there. Even daydreaming is difficult. It’s strange. I love my reality. This sounds like gloating now but it’s truly a remarkable feeling. When you’ve been battling depression for 15 years, it feels really freaking nice to say that I’m happy.

So that’s why I’m taking a break - in a very long, drawn out way. But my hope was that after this long story, you might understand truly why I am doing this. It would have been easier to just say that writing doesn’t bring me joy anymore but I feel that I owe more than that; especially because I really don’t know if I’ll write for this blog ever again. The last time I took a break, I disappeared without being able to explain myself and I wanted to do so now that I have the chance.

Ultimately, thank you to everyone who has stuck by me over the years. It’s truly been one hell of a rollercoaster. The friends I’ve made on here have seen me at my lowest of the lows. But hey! I’ll still be around. I just won’t be publishing or continuing any of my works anywhere in the near future. Seriously though. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. This website has helped me tremendously and I’ll never forget it. Besides, there’s lots of other exciting things happening in my life now so you’ll certainly see me pop in here and there to talk about it ♡

If you wish, you can message me for questions or anything you want to know. I’m an open book - at least about most things hehe. And don’t worry. I still very much love Taehyung and still wildly obsessing over how marvelous he is. Umf.

(here’s some recent photos of me as i rarely take selfies anymore haha. and a derp photo of me and the man i love >_< why is the cutest photo of him with the worst photo of me? still cute though hehe)

[supernoondles]

2021

The only time I ever post on Tumblr anymore: I yell into cyberspace signaling I am alive, but barely.

Continuing the format of these posts, the broad strokes of 2021 were...bad. It felt worse than 2020 to me. In 2020 it was socially acceptable to be miserable and burnt out and things were scary and no one really knew what was happening so we were kind to each other; in 2021 the long awaited arrival of vaccines (which, don't get me wrong, I'm immensely grateful for) brushed aside that care. I am not saying anything new by expressing my frustration at how, when privileged people can party, take vacations, and increase economic activity, we (the US I live in and experience, because I am one of those privileged people) ignore the ongoing pandemic. I distinctively remember going on campus again and being like, "wait, I haven't processed anything that's happened in the last 18 months?" and continue to feel that way about just about all the whiplash that's happened to me this year, pandemic related or not.

There was a lot of death this year. My friend A died. My brother's boyfriend's mother died. Reigen, my beautiful perfect angel rat died an excruciating, frustrating, and traumatic (for me) death. These three deaths were within a few months of each other. Small Baby, my second perfect boy, was great one Friday night and dying Saturday morning. The death of a pet, my first time experiencing loss of that scale as an actualized human being, was really difficult for me. On top of this, I am actively trying to graduate. I have completely lost any respect I had for one of my advisors, who constantly gaslights me, has made me seek therapy specifically to deal with him, and makes my therapist make this face whenever I tell her of what transpires in our meetings: >:O. I have been coerced—I would probably even say manipulated—to do a research project that I actively contend, both morally and research-wise (which, of course, I have expressed numerous times over the course of 6 months in which my concerns were completely dismissed) in exchange for a PhD as I think he knows we disagree epistemologically on everything. Thus my active graduation is more of a forced escape: I debated the choice for a good 4 months, saw no better alternative, and have only been working fueled by resentment and the abstract promise of a future without my advisor, which is like getting a car to run on corn oil. Speaking of car, I drive a lot more since I moved to the city, an hour away from campus now. I went into the pandemic still a junior PhD student, not knowing what I wanted, and I'm emerging (still in the pandemic) as a jaded senior student who knows what they want, but has been repeatedly denied the opportunity to do it.  

My end of year posts are usually a chronological retelling of things I did, or made, or how I passed the time, rather than how I emotionally dealt with things—I usually reserve that for my therapist and E. But this year there was so much emotional hardship. My therapist called the month of August a "constant slap in the face" which was very validating and very resonant. She also made me realize the literal full work day I take out of each week to be frustrated and angry and seemingly not productive is actually...necessary for my work to get done. And I fucking hate that! I'm so mad about it! As a person I am so rarely angry. 2021 has been a year of rage and being deeply dissatisfied and not having any good solutions. I'm trying my best. I really am. And I hope 2022 I'll see some good results for my efforts because I'm so exhausted from feeling like they aren't enough :')

Okay the catharsis of screaming how far away I am from the person I want to be (both in situation and reaction) aside, here is my long boring wall of text where I recall what I did per month.

January was, as all Januarys are in my childish optimism, a good start. The entire first quarter of the year was fine, honestly. I was back in my apartment with J and took an ear training class and this really bad "creativity" class in the anthro department that made me do really bad (I truly have no better descriptor, nor do I want to elaborate) art projects each week.

In late February I finally moved up to the city with M, and J in the third room before he want back to school in the fall. It kind of just happened in the span of a week. Saying goodbye to the place I had lived in four years was definitely bittersweet but my only regret was not moving up earlier. Living in the city—and especially so close to lush, abundant nature—was incredible for my mental health. It gave me the final push I needed to submit my summer internship project with W to an April deadline. I will particularly cherish seeing all the baby ducks and geese grow up in my weekly walks along the lake, which I feel like is an avian metaphor for America's melting pot. My time management skills improved a lot; I started using planners more intentionally, tracking my time, and doing weekly review meetings with myself. Still, the deadline involved more all nighters than any other deadline in the past, probably because it was just me working alone in my room. I missed the camaraderie of a lab. I got my second vaccine dose two days before, but thankfully had no symptoms.

And then 2021 went downhill. Emerging from my room I found not one, but two, $110 parking tickets from my NIMBY quasi neighbor for occluding their driveway by literally 2 inches. I got positive reviews back for my paper and my collaborators didn't say anything acknowledging them? Which was hurtful and confusing? And then M demanded I add all these new things into the paper during the rebuttal, which felt morally wrong? Doing work until the last minute to meet his arbitrary and last minute demands: that's me. The spring quarter did bring some joy, though; I lead two sections of a "how to do CS research" class which reminded me how much I love teaching, even if most of my students had their cameras off and I could not visually gauge how they were learning. I took a lot of beautiful hikes on sunny days. I applied to two funding sources and got both of them. One I really wanted—a fellowship for diverse senior PhD students to prepare them to be better faculty. The community I've made there has been amazing and I feel like it's been one of the only legitimate things this university, which loves to give lip service to promote its reputation, has actually done that's been beneficial for minority students. (Money in the pockets of students. We love to see it.) One was project specific and I was told to do by M; I proposed some future research projects I would be interested in which he rejected and then proposed a bad direct follow up to my previous work. I wrote the proposal because it was little effort on my end, got the funding because M is on the board who choses the projects and told me not to include his name, talked about potentially rejecting the money since I had another fellowship, but wasn't logistically fully funded for the fall because I didn't have enough units yet, so accepted the money and thus...was pushed into doing this bad follow up project. As a conciliation M said "yeah I think if you finish this we can get you out of here and into a postdoc," which completely threw me into a weeklong existential crisis of, "am I...going to graduate? Am I ready?" (which I decided, after several months, yes) and also "am I going to do a shitty thesis about a topic I'm embarrassed about?" (which, after several months and a lot of tears and my other advisor telling me repeatedly that no one will ever read or care about your thesis and also that this is the "path of least resistance", I have accepted).

In May, I took my first vaccinated trip to visit E which, again, transformed the boundaries of our relationship to something cherished and beautiful. I don't know how to write about people I'm in love with so we'll leave it here.

Summer in the city brought intense fog, moreso because I lived on the west side, that was an apt backdrop to all the shit that went down. It was the worst summer of my PhD by far. I spent the entire time trying to communicate with M why I didn't want to do this project I now had funding for to no avail—he would literally respond to my concerns with "eh, just do a little bit and maybe you'll like it more than you think." I didn't go outside because I was depressed I couldn't see the sun. I bought a national parks pass and went to Yosemite with M and D, and then Sequoia/King's Canyon with my family, both of which felt necessary. When I got back J, visiting, was in my house and M and I threw a solar solstice party on a day with no sun. The next week I saw Perfume Genius in a free outdoor concert, which was the biggest crowd I had been in since pre-pandemic times. I went hiking with S's lab, also seeing them for the first time since pre-pandemic. Several weekends in a row I waited two hours in line for a pastry. I had a brief obsession with Hollow Knight. I treated my brother to omakase, met T, an internet friend from when I was 10 who also lived in the city, hung out with D who visited, and drove to Pinnacles with A, also from out of town. Then M, L, and I went to Kauai to visit C and M who were living there for a month. These times were good. Then I came home, Reigen's eye was popped out of its socket, and we endured a grueling week of shitty access to proper care. J moved out and S moved in. I was convinced into buying $500 glasses as it was the last time (until I get a real job) I'd have actual vision insurance. I threw a birthday party and was sad the entire time about Reigen having died. I made spreadsheets for my plants and frogs. The smoke came in, though it wasn't as bad as last year. My dad and I went to MA to help J move into his new apartment, and I finally visited the place I had grown up in CT, and I was stunned by how small it was. Everything truly is much bigger when you're a child.

M moved out in the end of August to also go to school and G moved in. Our quadplex also filled its vacant front unit with college kids who drive a car with an ahegao sticker on the gas tank that begs, "Fill me up!". I went on many first dates, all unsuccessful for a wide variety of reasons. R, C, and T all moved to the city as well. I redyed my hair in preparation for the fall quarter starting back in person and bought a $50 bike I could leave on campus. With J gone, my parents and I went on a lot more hikes. I drove down to campus twice a week, which was more bearable than I thought. One day I spent 6 hours making shipping labels to send 40+ T-shirts all around the world. Another day I won a pair of Airpods in a raffle for an event I was asked to take photos of (and got paid $400 for doing, woohoo) which I regifed to my dad. In general I filled my days with meetings. I spent Mondays talking about academia with my fellowship cohort and scheduled my thesis proposal for the end of the quarter, which was the latest it could be for logistical funding reasons. Resigned, I made progress on Bad Final Project at a snail's pace. At the end of September I went to Emo Nite, my first indoor concert, and no one was wearing a mask except for me and G. The next day I saw Japanese Breakfast, where everyone was masked around me, and I cried when she struck the gong in Paprika. I saw Tennis the next week. Going to shows felt so, so, good, so I bought a few more for later in the year, where I realized that it wasn't the act of going to a show that I had missed; I just really liked Michelle's new album. (Jubilee and Happier Than Ever were basically the only music I listened to this year, besides KCRW's MBE which automatically plays at 9:05 as my weekday alarm.)

In October I got boosted and spent about 50 hours (I counted) making a Kass cosplay, as I was going to spend Halloween with E, who was Gerudo Link. Tommy Wiseau did a meet and greet at the theater by my house. I played in a pop up orchestra (how I missed making music!) and hosted a beach bonfire. N visited in November and I lost my $500 glasses. I became re-addicted to ACNH with the DLC, and also started (and streamed) a hardcore nuzlocke of BD to try to make the game more fun. My health was bad—I would always get just sick enough to not do work, but not sick enough to not game, or relax, or take care of myself. I think my body was trying to say something. I did a*** on the nude beach where D and L convinced me to climb over some rocks, I overestimated my ability to control my body, fell, and bled all over said rocks, but at least it's a good story.

Small Baby died two days before my thesis proposal in December. At about the exact time of his passing I had to take the biggest dump of my life while walking through the park; I never felt such a voracious need to get to a toilet before and on the seat I felt like I was purging my body from itself. That night, after driving over an hour north for bio-luminescent kayaking, the trip was suddenly canceled due to high winds, which I took as an omen to head back to my parents' home to bury him. During my proposal, J, the person on my committee who is not my advisors, gave feedback on things I had argued with M about the whole summer which was extremely validating. M didn't say a single word except announcing he had to leave. I tried to focus on making more research progress but found myself spending hours on other tasks: setting up my new phone, sewing skirts (around this time, I also became more femme), walking. I picked J up from the airport and acknowledged I was burnt the fuck out. On Christmas J's boyfriend joined us and I cooked a turkey that wasn't dry. Friends coming back for winter break on top of omicron meant a lot of drama for our new year's plans in SC. Mainly I ended the year playing a lot of Mahjong.

Now it's the part of the post where I review and refresh my resolutions. For 2020: (1) Get laid: yes. (2) Submit the two research projects I’ve been doing forever: kind of, I did one, and then M discouraged me from working on the other, which made me really sad. If I can finish Bad Final Project we'll revisit it. (3) Commit to writing down my thoughts that make me think, “Oh, that’s interesting, I should write it down.”: I did do this, but only for like two months, but I don't think it's because I got lazy; I think it's because I stopped having good thoughts.

I really want 2022 to be a better year and I really hope I can make it so. My biggest goal for the year is (1) to stop interacting with my bad advisor, thus to necessarily submit Bad Final Project. My other goal is to (2) secure what my next adventure will be post PhD. My ideal timeline is to finish Bad Project for the same April conference (it will be a lot of work, I'm definitely way behind where I was at this time last year) and then write my thesis over the summer while also taking art classes. I have a full other year of funding after this summer, but if I have an exciting thing coming up, I don't have to stick around—but I'm also totally fine with basically chilling for a year. Nice to have goals, though I won't beat myself up for not achieving them, are (3) lose 15 pounds and (4) leave the house at least once every two days.

I have no concluding paragraph. It's barely past midnight but I'm tired, so I'm going to bed.

[jasperwhitcock]

the rules: tag five or more people that you are thankful for in your 2020, that you're thankful exists in a world that's hard to live in. whether that be through random reblogs on your posts, or people you have had full blown conversations with. whether it's just seeing them in your dash, or interacting with them.

here to be gross again & catch up on another tag game *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

tagged by the angel that is kate @leahclearwaterdefensesquad

i love talking to u all everyday hehehe y’all saved my 2020

@inthemiddleofmymidnight i love u sm kimmie. my first friend on here. 🥺 i am giggling thinking of how shy we were... can u believe we’ve been bffs for like ten months... how is that possible?? i’ve literally already poured my heart out to u like 5 times this month so imma just keep it as ilysm. u literally bring me joy

@bellaskhakis neighana 🐎 ilysm!! i love having u in my life. it’s like we’ve been friends forever. i’m lucky to have u to always keep me humble 😩 hehe i’m kidding but also to give me advice or just to listen or be there. ur wonderful & i can’t imagine this year without u

@the-golden-onion mads... ew i’m laughing at myself... the way literally every speech i’m making sounds like the most basic speech made at a wedding... i’m being SINCERE here it’s not my fault i love all of u 😭 ok but mads i ADORE u. u keep saying how we’re a light in ur life but ur for real a light in our lives. i love having someone i have so much in common w that i can freak out abt acnh or pll or harry potter or twilight or mythical creatures or cute animals or writing fanfics or WHATEVER. my life is sooo much better w u in it. i’m obsessed w u

@howlonghaveyoubeenseventeen emma EWWW not me TEARING up ew make it STOP! emma thank u sm for the absolutely like relentless positivity and love and support u give all of us. the way u choose kindness and optimism is literally inspiring. ur the most caring, sincere, sweetest person in the world & all of our lives are severely improved having u around. ur like our sister

@bellasredchevy kae i admire u SO much. i eat up anything u post or anything u say... ik i’ve said it before and i think it sounds like mega cheesy but i think u just carry urself w such grace & wisdom (im embarrassed to say this when like our relationship is founded on a mutual love of TWILIGHT like tf sdhfdjfhfj) but i rlly just think ur so smart and compassionate and so u have the BEST takes & it really reflects on how u view the world and i just appreciate the expectations u have for how people treat each other (again this sounds SOO weird LMAO) i love u ur literally a part of the reason i joined the renaissance

@teamjacobthot dij i love the energy u bring into my life. ur always honest and blunt and hilarious and understanding and i feel like u just see things for what they are which is refreshing considering i’m someone who overcomplicates things. ur so beautiful & talented & just the coolest. i just thought abt u saying “is this let it go” like 2 minutes into frozen and i’m dead 😭 ilysm and also keep forgetting to tell u but jesy leaving has plunged me right back into another little mix lewis and i am sooooo sad

@cullen-collective ok i just had a moment of panic bc thinking abt u singing reminded me that the ratatouille musical is STREAMING RN LIVE AND I FORGOT but anyways. kaity i keep saying it but ur voice has BLESSED our lives. grateful for all the beautiful singing snaps & also the snaps where ur just telling stories bc i love listening to u talk hehehe. ur the sweetest and so funny & i love ur passion

@paulxlahotee i LOOOOVE u i’m so obsessed w ur TALENT & i admire u soooo much. ur literal JOY and i am so happy that the four l*ko did not make u d word... at least i hope so... has anybody heard from michele today??? she still w us? 😩 ur beautiful and hilarious i’m so lucky to know u!!!

@kaquiche taryn ILYSM ur literally the first person i remember interacting w my blog... it’s been u & me from the beginning baby 😩 u make me laugh so much and i love that ur always down to clown. ur just so supportive and silly and cute and i love u ok all of my messages are sounding like i am dr*nk i just love y’all ok leave me alone. also i didn't even see ur message abt zoom last night and now i feel sad that we all abandoned u. i spent my near year w u in spirit

@phil-dwyer-stan-account addison my dream in life is literally to hang out w u and go to the hello kitty cafe and disneyland and to skip in a big field of wildflowers in cute dresses. i love u!!! ur a cute sweet hardworking angel who deserves soooo much!!

@volturialice g once again... i am truly ur FAN i’m a volturialice STAN. ur one of my absolute FAVE blogs. i think ur genius & feel ~honored~ to be friends hehehe

@anagonyeet / @sethrights ama i love u so much i’m truly so grateful we became friends!! i’m so happy we’ve kept contact bc ur the sweetest, most supportive, and caring friend. i can’t believe u show up to support all my endeavors sdfhdghjkf. my fave follower on my animal crossing ig account hehehe

@leahclearwaterdefensesquad kate thank u for the tag!! ur so wonderful & i so appreciate all the leah content & that u think of me so often for tag games!! ily

and a thank u & i love u to all the blogs that are sweet friends of mine or post content i love & admire – @kellythepitiablefangirl (ur so talented... i adore ur art) @iknowyouloveme-thanks (u consistently make me laugh w ur posts) @renegadepack (thank u for the wolf pack content & also ur resource post... i’ve linked it a million times) @edwardsvirginity (another blog that made me join the renaissance bc i loved their posts) @edytheelizabethcullen (the SWEETEST angel ilysm) @rosaalee (ur moodboards are everything) @bellas-dumptruck-ass (funny & lovely & the best url) @emmettmc-heart-y (the KINDEST soul) @carllisle (happy every time i see ur url in my noties) @notquitetwilight (current god of the renaissance) @panlight (the funniest... thankful for keeping up w the cullens every day) @cockmcstuffins (the most iconic) @influenzabella (an absolute cutie) @witchyangela (elle is also an angel who provides the wolfpack content that we need) @angelasglasses (a sweetheart)

& all my moots!! i wish u all the happiest 2021 ♡♡♡

[liskantope]

After a couple of months or so of soul-searching, I've decided to seek help on something that a lot of people out there in Tumblr land might be able to weigh in on. (Not just another hopelessly complaining post, I promise.)

Several times lately on this blog I've brought up this thing (closely related discussion here) about never being able to complete professional tasks in anywhere near as efficient a manner as I feel I "should" or I see professionally successful people doing. While a certain sort of slowness at certain tasks has plagued me my entire life, it's only since the start of 2020 that this has come to a head. The reason for this makes sense in the context of the timeline of my professional life. My first postdoc (which lasted a long time) had no teaching requirements and in the end I managed to get substantial research done (fast enough in "better" months to sort of make up for my inactivity in "worse" months and the entire year of 2016). When I took up my current job in fall of 2019, after an unusually productive early 2019, I fully let myself off the hook research-wise so that I could wig out the entire fall over teaching three courses at a new university while trying to settle myself in a brand new city (literally the busiest period of my adult life*). But 2020, right from the start, was a semi-disaster for me in terms of research despite a lighter teaching assignment in both fall and spring, no teaching in the summer, and forced isolation in a quiet, drama-free apartment alone with no social involvement in anything to distract me. Somehow having a job that requires substantial amounts of teaching, at a quality higher than what I held myself up to in grad school (which felt more like following orders anyway), has set me Perpetually Behind.

Where I feel my life is now is that my career hopes are hanging by a thread (a lot depends on this summer going better than last summer did), while my personal life feels almost entirely hopeless. Actually I should be happy that I and many of the people around me are getting vaccinated now (first shot down, one to go!) and can look forward to social things beginning to revert back to normal in the summer. But as long as my persistent state of Being Hopelessly Behind on research continues, I might have trouble finding time for the (unfortunately rather daunting) task of building a social life from pretty much nothing.

So I'm coming to feel that the only thing I can grab onto at the moment for hope that I can turn just about everything in my life around is to somehow deal with this executive problem. And that since my recognizing it as a chief personal issue for more than the past year still hasn't resulted in me finding a way to cure it, I suppose it's about time to take off the high-agency goggles and put on the low-agency ones. Ironically, sometimes this is necessary for getting up and actually doing something about one's problems.

For Reasons that I have trouble understanding myself and would take a much longer post than this to examine out loud, I've stubbornly refused to ever really confront the neurological issues I've had since early childhood, to the point of pretty much never even discussing them on Tumblr, home of pretty close to the most open-about-neurological-issues subculture that exists on the internet. So I don't think I've said much about being aware I have ADD (as it would have been called when I was getting examined for it in childhood) or ADHD, although I may have mentioned it in passing. I've never bothered to actually research this cluster of conditions or to ask my parents for details of my diagnosis as a kid (although the latter is partly because this diagnosis happened in the mid-90's and I've always assumed this whole area of science has been practically revamped since then). But -- and I don't know why this took me so long -- I came to the realization some weeks ago (and not until after writing the above-linked posts!) that maybe this is the crux of my current issues. This came specifically from pondering how other mathematicians I've closely worked with on research or studies don't actually seem any faster than I am when I'm focused on figuring something out over a several-minute period, but that somehow most of them magically get both research and teaching work done at a far faster pace than I do, and that I constantly space out when trying to focus on just about anything (I think often without realizing how many times I'm spacing out almost like little microsleeps). Well, that plus about a dozen other issues I've been consciously aware of for years, relating to my ability to pay attention to shows/films, listen when someone is talking to me in a monologue, etc. There is pretty much no doubt in my mind that I have some clinical level of something in the ADHD cluster (the attention deficit part, not the hyperactivity part and definitely not the impulsiveness part) as an adult.

So now I'm steeling myself to seek out a diagnosis for this and see if there's hope of some kind of treatment, and I'm finding the prospect rather daunting at the moment. But I'm telling myself to investigate this as if my career (and general prospects at happiness) depends on it, because I have a feeling maybe at this point it does.

What really daunts me the most -- once I figure out the logistics of getting a psychiatry/neurology appointment and if/how this would work with my insurance -- is researching and weighing the risks of medication. I've never taken medication for any kind of brain thing before (unlike, I imagine, a lot of Tumblr); my parents were always somewhat against it and decided against putting me on anything as a child (I don't know if it was Ritalin they were suggesting or something else?) mainly on the grounds that side effects would be scary and I seemed to be doing well in school anyway; I went through all of K-12, college, grad school, etc. without any kind of accommodations. Now my parents seem to like the idea of me trying something but they seem to assume that the options are different now 25 years later, and that surely there are better substances available without the risk of terrible side effects. Now that I'm finally bringing myself to Google this stuff, I'm finding no evidence to back up their optimism, though -- it seems that the main medical solution is still Ritalin which is still pretty heavy-duty, side-effect-heavy stuff that could permanently change my brain or maybe even my personality.

Anyway, I imagine this as more like a two-paragraph post, and I've gone on pretty long about it, I guess at this point I'm curious if anyone here has some advice they could lend from direct experience or at least better knowledge in these matters than I have, especially about the diagnosis process and even more especially about medication options. (I assume there is no widespread "cure" for life-affecting inattention issues through a therapy program or anything else other than a substance... so gaah.)

*But, case in point, I have a friend who had essentially my exact job in my department prior to my arrival, and she managed to do it alongside a completely separate second full-time job (I mean, I doubt she had to deal with things like furnishing a new home alone at the time, but still). This is what I mean about some people seeming to be capable by a whole-number factor of doing more things than others.

[wigglebox]

Hi! Thank you for the post about Natalie Fisher's tweets. I reblogged them because it was the first thing I saw after I woke up and just felt so deflated... but at the same time I thought, hey, maybe it IS wise to not expect anything? I'm usually so positive but this situation is stressing me out. Sometimes I hate being so invested in this show. I've been watching it for 10+ years and went through so many disappointments it's hard to stay positive sometimes. Thanks for being the voice of reason!

I was going to answer privately but I think maybe it’s better to share my answer publically if you don’t mind. 

One thing I’m never sure of, other than Sera Gamble, is what people had been disappointed in, so I’m not gonna dive into that either lol. 

The way I’m looking at it is that this situation right now we find ourselves in is literally nothing else you can compare within this show because the show (well this aspect of the show, the relationship part) had been building for so long. We’re seeing what it was building up to. It’s the finale so situations are not the same as they were in like, season 7 or whatever.  This is my way of saying that since we can’t compare this situation to any other situation in the show, I don’t think it’s unacceptable to get your hopes up a little. 

BUT—that depends on you and how you know you’d react if someone was wrong or something didn’t go as you saw it, because that will happen to some degree, None of us can see the future. 

So you have to measure your level of optimism against how far you think you’d fall if things didn’t go how you expected them to—or indeed—if you expected anything at all. 

The biggest thing that I want to point out that also is roughing everyone up a little is (and I’m speaking American terms here):

2020 election

Pandemic which is so horrible in this country

The fact we were supposed to have seen this all in May but everything got paused for months so it’s just been building anticipation anxiety

The fact that our comfort show (if it is indeed your comfort show) is about to end.

And even if you’re not American and the first two don’t apply to you, then the bottom two do, especially if you’ve been watching for over 10 years. 

At the heart of all of this, I think that’s tripping a lot of us up. And you may sit there going “No I don’t feel anxious I don’t feel nervous about any of that” but anxiety is stealthy, and we know that.

Before November 3rd (election) I had been just a little stir crazy and jumpy because I knew that day at work (I work in the news industry) was going to be crazy and I was going to be on my own, and the day after, and I had been so so so nervous we were actually going to get a presidential call that night and I was going to wake up to bad news again like in 2016. It was anticipation anxiety (and a little low grade PTSD).

“What ifs” are anxiety’s attempts are worming its way into your brain and parking there.

There is a chance I am wrong about everything. Statistically, that is a possibility, and now do I think everything I think will happen will actually happen, but I think at the end of the day is yea, maybe some nerves if Confession Part 2 will happen or if someone will come back in the episode, and that’s natural—but at the end of the day anticipation anxiety is kicking our imaginations into high gear, bringing back alllll the memories of alllll the other episode that maybe weren’t our favorites or storyline that wasn’t our favorite, which makes us even jumpier. 

In which I’ll point to again, that this situation right now as we’re sitting here or whatever, has nothing to be compared to within this show. Even with other shows! 

And people like Natalie Fisher, God bless, don’t help. People who go around saying they ~know someone~, or know someone who knows someone, people throwing out vague spec that some take as fact. You can’t tell who’s trolling, who’s truthful, who’s just confused, or interpreting things wrong. She herself didn’t even get 15x18 to screen beforehand. 

There are not that many people who know what’s going on on Thursday, and when asked, will tell the truth because if anything got traced back to them (especially for spoiling a big episode) they’d never work in show business again. Literally. There was an extra on the Glee set named Nicole Crowther, I literally remember like it was yesterday, who spoiled that at prom, Kurt as gonna be named Prom Queen and there would be some drama but also some “yay relationship things”. The fandom went nuts and she got blacklisted because it was an important moment. And that was just an episode. Imagine getting caught spoiling the season finale of a 15-year show?  I mean some people are just dumb and evil and would do it anyway but since you don’t know who means what, it’s wise to just keep scrolling past it. 

It helps that anticipation anxiety, it helps your own state of mind and it helps you, at least for one minute, take a deep breath to ground yourself again. Measure how much you can handle in terms of things not going how you saw them in your head, and be that level of optimistic. <3