#also in the last image the stuff in front of Pearl was meant to be like… mist. but I got lazy lol

[cleocatrablossy]

My grandma told me when the crescent moon looks like a bowl it catches the rain. And it’s fact that the moon pulls the tides. So does the moon not hold the very source of life itself? A world without water is a world we’d never know, and even if in existence without the tides it would be a very different one.

[notnctu]

now playing: can’t help falling in love - elvis presley 

lee jeno x fem!reader genre - fluff details - established relationship  word count - 1,582 synopsis - where you and jeno attend your best friends’ wedding.

a/n - this is for @kpopscape‘s jukebox friday <3 inspo from the wedding scene in the movie crazy rich asians! also i hope this isn’t confusing LOL the first part is a back and forth between jeno/(y/n) pov, like it switches between the conversations but ultimately they’re in separate rooms -author doie ❀

Lee Jeno stands in a pampered black and white suit, with a classic black tie situated up to his neck. Hair is slicked with a thick gel that he can’t wait to wash out, but gives his forehead a special feature for this very special day. He’s nervous, not entirely sure why, he’s not the one getting married. 

The outdoor wedding scene has always been one of your favorites. A rooftop that looks over the vast ocean, the thin horizon that separates water from sky. The decorative floral altar frames the center perfectly. You’re incredibly jittery, not entirely sure why, you’re not the one getting married.

Your best friends panic respectively in their own rooms. It’s mad chaos when you re-enter the cramped room. The mom of the groom is leaving no space for breaths, beating down the neck of your best friend. As your duty of maid of honor, you’re rushing to her rescue.

“I think it’s time to start heading to your seats now.” You usher every relative that isn’t suppose to be in the area. Excited chatter erupt from each of them, overly joyous that the occasion is about to start. 

Now, you have a best friend to reassure as she sits in her glorious chiffon gown and a heavy frown on her painted lips. “What can I do to help the bride?” An unfamiliar peppiness embodies you, hoping to lighten her mood. 

Smoothing your own dress under you, you sit down in front of her and hold her hands in your own. Her glittery eye makeup catches the light from the marveling late afternoon sun and the strands of her hair are pinned by pearl clips out of the frame of her delicate face. 

“Is this what cold feet feels like?” She asks carefully. And when she looks up, her glossy eyes are much of a shock as the question itself. 

In the groom’s room, every person is scrambling for their dress shoes. Jeno sits in the corner of the room, quietly observing the frantic lack of responsibility on display while also fulfilling his role as best man by consoling the sullen groom on his big day. 

“What does it feel like?” Jeno genuinely inquires and he waits for the answer from his best friend.

Jeno notices his slumped forward shoulders, as if all the confidence in his best friend is drained out. Nonetheless, this is the best he’s ever seen him clean up. A smooth shave, without a cut in sight and accessories that actually complement his suit. Throughout all the craziness, this is a show stopping man before him. Who knew suits can make such a difference?

“Cold feet... it feels confusing.” His best friend fiddles his thumbs as if guilt preoccupied his conscience for feeling this way on his wedding day. “I love her, but what is that suppose to feel like? Do you know what love feels like, Jeno?”

Jeno blinks and without a doubt answers, “I do.” and his automatic thought is you. He will never stop falling in love with you. 

Your best friend peers out the window and the empty room provides a serene silence on this beautiful day. The serious question now fills the air instead. 

You gulp, the pure image of Jeno’s smile enters your mind. Love is Jeno, he holds your hand as if he’s always afraid that you’d let go. “I do.” And a gentle smile finally rests on your best friend’s face. You simply can’t help falling in love with Jeno and she knows.

“It’s like how a river flows into the sea.” Jeno stuffs his hands into the pockets of his dress pants. The analogy sounded better in his head, but he can see the gears turn. 

“It’s just meant to be.” You add to your best friend’s heavy sigh. 

“It’s time.” A knock startles the men in the room and Jeno stands up. He instructs his best friend to take a few deep breaths before heading out. Jeno lightly dusts his shoulders and bids his good friend a warm smile.

“It’s just meant to be.” Jeno whispers and gives him a firm pat, and his friend nods. A smile grows tenfold at Jeno’s last words. 

Jeno has always been the person of the friend group who gives love advice before he’s ever felt it. It wasn’t for four years ago when he met you did he actually understand what he told others.

Love is more than emotional. It’s taking your hand in a large crowd so you’re not lost. It’s early evening dinners spent together. It’s active listening to the other person’s troubles. It’s simple, yet too complex to explain. Some things are meant to be. 

Finally, you two rejoin with one another and form the orderly line that every pairing walks down the aisle in. Jeno takes your hand, as you offer your world to him. The charming toothy smile that he’ll never grow tired of seeing, your hands intertwine. You both seem anxious, not entirely sure why, you two aren’t the ones getting married. 

But you two face the closed doors that are about to open. The soft gentle song begins to play, announcing the start of their beautiful journey. 

Jeno gives your hand a small squeeze, “everything okay?” His whisper is almost inaudible. 

“Not something I couldn’t fix. You?” You mumble back, the doors open and the groom starts his walk down the aisle. 

“I do learn from the best.” From side eye peeks, you see the sly grin on your boyfriend’s charming face. “So yeah, not something I couldn’t fix.” 

You both walk down the aisle in unison. The white rolled out sheet that has pink flower petals scattered across disappear under your feet with each step. Mutual friends sit in the crowd and their distant relatives all wear expressions of awe.

The music is drowned out when you two reach the altar, separating to join the different sides of the couple. Something inside you tells you not to look at Jeno standing on the other side, not yet. 

Facing forward, each groomsmen and bridesmaid pairing flood in one by one. The final repetition of the song and your best friend is ready for her entrance. Her sheer veil drapes over her face, a large bouquet of pink roses in her hands, each step brings her closer to her future husband.

You’re immersed, completely close to tears just at the moving image of your best friend finding a love so true. Years after years, she’s been wandering the Earth set searching for a perfect partner. You felt a bit foolish to have found Jeno before she had found someone, wondering if you rushed too soon into a relationship. 

Jeno has always felt unreal to you. There’s something new and old to love about him every day. You love that he just always knows what to say, remembering a moment in time when you asked, “shall I stay?” and for him to reply, “would it be a sin if you did?” for you, of course not. 

You had promised yourself that you wouldn’t cry and everything was smooth sailing, until the vows and you consequently make eye contact with Jeno across the altar.

It’s as if time stopped, you two are in your own world. Jeno’s eyebrows rise up subtly in shock, like a whole waterfall of epiphanies washed over him. He sees you blinking back at him, as beautiful as ever in a formal gown and a small bouquet in your hands.

Jeno hears the vows, “for I can’t help falling in love... with...” and your mouths move in synchronization as you two mouth the last word silently to yourselves, “you.” 

Your heart is ready to burst out of your chest and a tear happens to slip down your face. Not only are you incredibly happy for the newly weds, you’re soaring through the sky that Jeno loves you as much as you love him.

Jeno smiles sweetly at the droplet that draws down your cheek and your poor attempt to wipe it away. But he’s staring at you as if you’re all he’s ever wanted in love. Is this what his friend feels as they exchange rings? The realization that this is the only person you’re ever going to love. 

He’s made up his mind. He’s going to marry you one day, like it’s set in stone. “I do.” Your friends’ futures are sealed and celebratory cheers break you two out of the trance. 

“Congratulations.” You hug your best friend as tightly as you can before she walks down the aisle together with her new husband. Jeno steps forward, interlocking your fingers proudly and placing a small kiss on the back of your hand.

“I can’t wait to experience that all over again.” There’s a happiness in his step and the way his smile beams. “Only, it will be us exchanging vows at the altar.” 

Perhaps Jeno is intoxicated from the joyous atmosphere of the wedding, but you don’t mind. You love him all the more to want to share something as special as today, “you aren’t ready for what I would say to you.” 

Jeno chuckles, pinching your cheek lovingly. “In that case, you better make me cry, you big soft baby.” 

You pretend that you’re offended, pouting a little before bursting into giggles with your boyfriend. There’s a million things you’d want to say to Jeno, but the one thing you’ll never forget to mention would be, “I love you, Lee Jeno.”

[purpleyellow]

You got us

Seventeen 14th member

Hayun’s masterlist

“The end of Seventeen Project”

Trigger warning: mentions of dead parents

a/n: We’re going sad hours. Feel free to let me know your thoughts💙. Ask box is also open to random chats.

Hayun was no stranger to changes, moving around cities and even countries since very little, she knew better than getting attached to places. Of course, that all meant nothing when it came to losing her parents, that year, although not very far, had quickly become an emotional mess of a memory in her mind. 

It was most definitely the biggest turning point in her life, coming to Korea to live with grandparents she had never met in person before while having to adjust to a completely new life from the one she had in Brazil and even in the US as a toddler, Hayun struggled to find a place for herself. But for some unknown force, she ended up in a group with thirteen boys, who had the same goals as her, and who made her feel at home when she didn’t think it was possible.

Once they started Seventeen Project and the Pledis CEO took away their rings, Hayun felt as if a rug had been pulled from under her, showing her again that she should never get comfortable with something because that could be taken away. 

With every mission, the girl tried her best to focus on the praises given at them, but nothing felt completely right like there was some kind of confirmation she needed to let her know she was doing the right thing, yet that never came. So the girl relied on cheering her members, getting them to a winner's headspace and hoping that that would, by some miracle, reflect on herself.

After the last mission, when the CEO told them he didn’t have their rings, even though their performance had been intensely praised, her mind went blank, and for what felt like the 100th time that month, the girl wondered if there was something she could do to revert the situation. Once the group was told to turn around and the curtains dropped to reveal their families standing there her mind short-circuited.

It took her some time to understand what was going on, and after everything was done she would be thankful for standing on the side since all of the boys moved forward to embrace their parents while she just stood there staring at the polished image of her grandmother, pearl necklace and black pencil skirt just like she remembered.

Taking a deep breath, the girl tried her best to ignore tears and heartfelt words exchanged around her, instead bowing politely to the older woman like she had been instructed many times before.

“Since I’m your legal guardian I was called to this… event” The woman spoke looking around awkwardly, also feeling a little weird with the affection shown between the families on their side. Taking a ring box from her purse, she showed to the girl “It appears to me you want this”

The girl’s eyes glimmered seeing the box making her grandmother smirk. Bowing with her head to represent respect Hayun tried her best not to get on the woman’s bad side like she usually did “This means a lot for me, I hope you can understand”

Scoffing, the woman opened the box and held her hand out for Hayun to place hers on top, but instead of rolling the ring on her finger, she stared at the girl’s eyes until she was looking back at her.

“I could never understand this” She spoke loud enough for only her to hear “But you chose your path so never do less than your best” Taking a deep breath, the woman shook her head “I honestly have no idea what your parents would think of this”

With a long sigh, the grandma finally gave her the ring, but instead of filling the void she had experienced getting complete, Hayun felt her heart drop and her doubts became more clear. Cleaning her throat to not let her guard down, Hayun nodded and bowed, letting out an almost inaudible “Thank you”.

As a chance to blink away a tear that had formed, she looked around the stage they were on, all of the boys still hugging and happily interacting with their parents, the scene making the space between her and her grandmother bother her more than ever. Hayun wondered what kind of magic the editors would have to pull off to make their interaction more heartfelt than it truly was.

Giving a tight-lipped smile to Mingyu next to her, he was quick to introduce her to his family, making Hayun feel a little more included, while her grandma stood on the same spot, occasionally bowing to Mingyu’s mom when she turned around to speak to her.

The mingling time didn’t last for much longer, the CEO had prepared a little speech to give them as well as letting them perform to their families as a thank you gift, although Hayun knew it would be far from a gift to the older woman.  As soon as the camera’s turned off, and they were given more time to spend with their relatives, Hayun saw her grandmother getting up and waving for her to come closer. 

“Just as a confirmation, this is what you’re choosing right?” The question was blank, there was neither a sarcastic or comforting tone to it.

“Yes” Hayun nodded with her head low.

“Okay, don’t disappoint yourself” The grandma patted her on the back, and after giving the girl her blessing, she was the first family member to leave the place.

Jumping back on the stage, the girl approached Seungkwan who was clinging to his mother, to hopefully get her head out of things and meet the families of the ones she was fond of, but her behavior didn’t sit right with one of them.

Seungcheol found himself in a little dilemma, while he wanted more than nothing to spend some time with his parents, he knew Hayun wasn’t fine by the way her eyes glossed over a few times and the obvious lack of companionship on her side.

Introducing his family to Jeonghan, he pleaded for them to wait five minutes for him, giving each of them a bear hug before walking to where the girl was and gently asking to speak to her in private. 

“Why so gloomy?” He asked her once they were in an empty room, only a black couch in the corner filled with musical equipment. “I can tell you want to cry”

“We got our debut date” Hayun smiled at him shrugging her shoulders “You don’t have to look around to see everyone is emotional, some of them are literally crying right now. And don’t think I didn’t see your tears a few moments ago”

Punching his shoulders playfully, the girl crossed her arms looking around, yet her concerned eyes gave away there was something she wasn’t opening up.

“Did you wish your grandma had stayed for a little longer?” Cheol asked, trying to understand her better.

“Not really” She shrugged her shoulders again, taking a deep breath to try to explain the situation to him “After I had to move in with her and grandpa, we never got close. I’m thankful they gave me a house and tried their best to teach me how to be polite and all that education stuff. But this part of my life, now more than ever, is ending”

Nodding to her, Scoups managed to catch on something she didn’t explicitly say, but feeling she might need to let it out, he placed a comforting hand on her shoulder and squeezed it before asking her.

“You wish your parents were here don’t you?” Those eight words were enough to make tears emerge and start falling from her eyes, pulling her to a hug, he patted her head as she clung to his shirt.

“What kind of question is that? Of course, I do” Hayun sniffled and gave him a small slap on the chest, but not giving up on the hug since she still was crying like she never had in front of him, or any of the boys for that matter. 

Drawing patterns on her back, Cheol waited for her breathing to stabilize “There’s no one else here, you can say whatever you want,” 

“I have no idea if this is what they wanted for me” Hayun finally said what she had been thinking since the encounter earlier, “I think this has subconsciously been eating me alive because I’ll never get to know if I’m making them proud.”

“How could you think you’re not making them proud?” Cheol’s smile could be heard from his soft tone. “You’re following your dreams. You never let your guard down and did as you could to do what you wanted, there’s no way your parents aren’t happy for you”

“But still” She sniffled pulling away to dry her tears, much calmer than before “My mom would always tell me that as long as our family is in agreement no bad choices could be made. After they passed away I feel like I’m walking around blind and there’s no way to know if I’m going the right way”

“Well, then you should be glad you now have thirteen brothers to make sure you’re doing fine” He smiled fondly cradling her head as she let out a breathy laugh, his words making her feel the safest she had in years “We take care of each other now Hay, you're not walking alone, and nothing is going to change that”

[anywhozits]

A Christmas Announcement

Rating: T Words: 5172

Verse: Canonverse Pairing: Kristanna

Summary: Kristoff and Anna are excited to finally share the news of their heir-on-the-way with the Kingdom of Arendelle.

Notes: I wrote this last year and forgot to post it, but this is somewhat related to the Christmas fic I’m writing for this year so wanted to get this out before that one! (at least it’s in the same verse and has similar themes, hah) Anyway hope you enjoy and happy holidays!! Thanks for reading :)

READ ON AO3 HERE

The day was Christmas Eve, 1843. A couple years ago, the whole kingdom of Arendelle began celebrating together at the castle’s now officially annual Christmas ball. Something that Anna had begged Elsa to start since the great freeze ended and the doors to the castle became permanently open. It had taken awhile, but finally Elsa caved to her sister’s wishes, likely only partially due to years of internalized guilt for pushing her away, and the ball quickly became one of Anna’s most anticipated nights of the year. Now with Anna as Queen, the tradition continued.

The entire ballroom was filled with glittering decorations, tinsel adorning the sturdy wood beams. Buffet tables sat lining almost the entire left side of the room, filled bountifully with food to feed the whole town and then some. Lefse, lutefisk (the bane of child and teen Anna’s existence), farikal, pickled herring, kjottkaker, salmon, whale steak, sheep, all the traditional favorites. And that, of course, didn’t even including the two tables of desserts and pastries or the sprawling drink selection. A massive 12-foot Christmas tree stood proudly in the right corner of the space, decorated with great care by Anna and Kristoff themselves. Year after year, Anna always insisted she didn’t need any help from the castle attendants, only a few ladders and a few hours of time alone. She always pulled through. The tree—her pride and joy. This Christmas, Anna had also taken the time to pick out hundreds of presents for the Arendellian children and children-at-heart. Kristoff even did some woodworking for the occasion. Highlights included hand carved rocking horses, rolling reindeer on a string, and building blocks. They couldn’t wait for those presents to be torn open by frantic hands, truly cherishing the visual of children playing for hours on the sweeping ballroom floor, both King and Queen watching misty eyed as they imagined their own child playing along next year. A new tradition.

They had hired both a 5-piece band and a choir to make sure that the ball was not lacking in festive music and thus not lacking in dancing. The choir had kicked off the party singing Christmas songs in perfect harmony, the music floating through the castle, making the previously cold stone walls feel more comforting and protective. Guests had started arriving, smiles plastered on each of their faces as they ran through the open castle gates, eyes wide in childlike awe when they entered the ballroom to see the most elaborate Christmas ball yet.

But two people were thus far missing from the party.

Kristoff knocked softly on his and Anna’s chamber door before letting himself in. He saw Anna, dressed to the nines in a green velvet gown topped with white ruffles that hugged her shoulders. Her upper chest was left bare save for a three-layered pearl necklace, an early Christmas gift from Mattias. The sleeves gaped open, lined by white fur that Kristoff knew felt as soft as it looked. Her hair laid atop her head in an intricately braided bun, her gold and emerald crown placed perfectly in the middle, always bringing out the brilliant green that usually hid within her typically cerulean eyes. Kristoff could only think one word. Radiant. Anna was radiant. Sincerely, Anna sparkled. She always sparkled. But something about walking in on her like this, dressed for the ball, so majestic in every single way… made Kristoff feel as if he might cry for the love that grew and blossomed within his heart. A love so permanent… a love so unyielding that he felt it with both a fiery passion and a patient comfort. He took in a breath. Regarding her magnificence for a second time. Her gold shoes sparkled in the candlelight, heels subtle enough to allow her to dance for hours but tall enough to allow her to kiss him without getting on her tip toes. His eyes floated up to her dress yet again. Even though the gown cinched at her waist, Kristoff swore he could make out a little bit of the swell that was their growing child. He took in another breath. She looked ravishing. How could he be so lucky to call her his wife?

But Anna paid no mind to Kristoff, not then. She was looking in the mirror. Frowning. Frustrated.

But still so beautiful.

“Anna, honey, are you ready to go downstairs? The doors are open, and people are flooding in… I think even Elsa and Honeymaren are already here.” Elsa was finishing up the ice sculptures. Her only task this year, something that made her beyond thankful.

“I’m almost ready! I’m just… I don’t know. I don’t feel right. But I can’t put my finger on why.” Anna twirled around in front of the mirror. “The only thing keeping me chugging along is the promise of lots of food. I’m starving.”

“Yes—that was the journal entry for this week. Ravenously hungry. Insatiable I think was the word I used.” For Anna, eighteen-ish weeks pregnant meant the constant desire to stuff her face with literally everything she laid her eyes on. It was like she had this itch that could never be scratched. A deep hole in her stomach that could not ever be fully filled. But the most unfortunate part was that she somehow had recently begun to crave lutefisk. Lutefisk. The food she would have to plug her nose to eat as a kid. Clearly pregnancy made her leave logic at the door. Kristoff sauntered up to her and brought her in close, wrapping his strong arms around her frame, resting them gently on her mid-section, hooking his chin over her right shoulder and kissing her softly on first her shoulder and then her neck and then her cheek before settling back into the crook of her neck. He smiled. This was pure bliss.

Anna entangled her fingers with his own, both resting on her belly. She sighed. “I swear I could eat literally all of Sven right now and only feel a little bit guilty.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Kristoff laughed into her shoulder.

“I’m starving!” Anna pouted, but then Kristoff kissed her neck again softly and she shivered. Too distracting.

“Well, I know for a fact there’s a lot of food in the ballroom if you want to get a move on…”

“I want to, I really do… but. Still. I’m … you know what? I think I know what it is,” Anna said, pulling away from Kristoff suddenly. “You know how a few weeks ago I had to switch to the maternity corset? Because I really uh—popped out that one morning and couldn’t fit into my old one anymore even with the laces practically undone?” One midwife had even said that Anna looked much bigger than what women usually did at this point in pregnancy. Something that she said could mean there was more than one baby on the way…Anna and Kristoff were far too thrilled with that possibility but had mutually decided they didn’t want to get their hopes up if it didn’t come to fruition. Their baby coming into the world already with a friend… already decidedly not alone. It felt almost serendipitous to Anna, but she still refused to think of it more than fleetingly. So for now—one baby. Singular baby.

“I remember,” he said.

“Well, I hate this thing. It’s so … constricting and it hurts and I can hardly breathe let alone gorge myself with disgusting and foul and gross but somehow still super satisfying lutefisk. Like do you really think this is good for the baby?”

Kristoff shook his head. “Probably not—”

But Anna was on a roll. She bulldozed through the answer he gave to her likely rhetorical question. “I know it’s not breathing or anything right? But … it kind of feels like I’m squishing the baby or something and knowing it’s yours and everything it’ll probably be massive so needs lots of room to… get that way. Oh wait no I can’t think about that. Oh God. Massive. Get that image out of my head please. Too big to come out of me and the pain and owwwww.”

Kristoff stepped closer to Anna and hugged her close, stroking comforting circles on her back. “Hey, it’s okay,” he said. She whimpered. “For the record, I don’t think I was too big as a baby. Although, you know… I don’t remember.”

Anna rolled her eyes. “Very helpful.”

“I do have some chocolate to tide you over, though. That’s helpful, right?”

Her eyes lit up instantly, nodding her head in ferocious fervor. “Yes, yes, yes. Super, super helpful. Very helpful. The most helpful of all helpful!” Kristoff reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out maybe six truffles. Anna ate them in a flash. “God, these are so good.” Then she frowned again. “But I can already feel my corset getting tighter! And, you know what? What’s it all for, hmm? So I can better hide I’m pregnant? Yeah that’s right I said the word. So, what? You know, it’s really grating to me that something that really deserves to celebrated is instead something that needs to be … hidden away. Like the expectation for a queen is to be prim and proper and ladylike and pure or—whatever…while also producing heirs upon heirs. So, what happens when the very thought of being ‘with child’ comes with this implication that you’re not pure? Even though obviously I mean it’s way more concerning if you’re married and still pure, right? And I know I’m saying this about royalty and everything but that’s just my situation. Generally it’s definitely not just for queens. This is any woman. The expectation of any woman.  Nobody cares if men are pure. So they’re just producing heirs or kids or namesakes? … left and right and it’s all fine and dandy. It’s just ... really frustrating. And this stupid corset is like the physical proof of this horrible thing and it’s really making me…so—angry.” Anna let out a long breath. It felt good to get all that out. It truly had been building upon itself in this storm of emotions for the last couple weeks. Constantly growing until this moment.

“You know you’re the Queen, right?”

“Uh—yeah. Pretty sure I just talked a lot about that in my little speech.”

“Yes, right. Yes. But I mean… you’re the Queen.”

“Yes, I know. What’s your point?”

“Well, you’ve got the power, baby,” Kristoff said. “Show them how it’s done. You can … make a decree or—or something. Or you can just lead by example. I’ll support you, Anna. You know I’ll support you. And I agree with you, too. The whole thing’s pretty ridiculous. And definitely not healthy for our massive baby.”

Anna crossed her arms over her chest. “Not funny.”

“Take it off, baby. Off with the maternity corset.”

“I want to … but then people will be able to tell, right?”

“You really think they don’t know? Let me ask you this. Truly—how many people do you think are actually in the dark?”

“Uh—I don’t know. Maybe … four?”

“Exactly! Don’t feel like you need to still hide it. The whole castle has known for a long time. You were wearing the maternity corsets! Someone had to make that for you and you know your maids knew right away. Word is out, Anna. We just can’t be open open about it yet. Soon … but you don’t need to hide it. You shouldn’t hide it.”

She contemplated his words for a minute or so before planting a chaste kiss on his lips. “Thanks, husband. You’re the best listener.” He grabbed her hand and gave her a quick twirl, already preparing for the dancing he knew would take up most of his night.

“Always, my sweet love.”

“Now help me get this thing off. Right now. Please.” Anna turned so her back was to him. His large hands wrapped around the velvet buttons of her dress, undoing them at an unparalleled pace. Soon, the dress dropped to the floor and Anna stepped out of it, only standing in her off-white corset and bloomers. The maternity corset had a slightly different shape, dipping lower to cover her entire stomach, and had two extra sets of laces, one on each side that supposedly allowed for more breathing room and expansion along with a growing belly, but Anna disagreed. It felt just as constricting as her usual corset. She jumped in front of Kristoff again. “Off, off, off!”

He obeyed again, large hands undoing the laces but moving closer as he did this, planting periodic kisses on her shoulders. His mind instantly shot back to the first time he unlaced her corset. Years ago.

The beginning of their … exploration was too hurried. They so rarely got time alone and took it whenever they could … wherever they could … as fast as they could. There was never time to take off any clothes. Dress scrunched up her waist, drawers and breeches pushed down to their ankles was the name of their game. But eventually they got bolder. They snuck around in the middle of the night… and in those stolen moments in the moonlight, they had more time. Kristoff remembered ripping off her dress, throwing it into the corner of her room. Turning his attention to her undergarments, working his hands around the laces, trying to figure out how to make this as swift as possible. He smirked. “Is this appropriate?”

“Of course not,” Anna giggled. Kristoff planted kisses on her bare shoulders and then her collarbones. “But when have I ever been concerned with what’s appropriate?”

Kristoff smiled again at the memory. When he finally shot back to reality, he saw that he was almost done with the laces. He pulled the last few and threw the corset far away from them. It landed with an air of dramatics on her dressing partition.

Anna sighed in relief. “God, you’re so much faster at this than my maids.”

“Years of practice paired with years of … urgency.” Kristoff said, smirking.

It had taken him much longer than he felt comfortable admitting to take that corset off that first night, but since then he’d figured out a foolproof strategy.

She turned around to give him a deep kiss. “I’m free. Thank you.”

Kristoff inhaled sharply. She was even more magnificent like this, ballgown tossed to the side.  He brought a hand up to cup her chin and his other drifted down to her stomach. He gave it a rub and she kissed him in response, giggling slightly. “You’re radiant, baby. So beautiful.”

“You really think so?”

“You take my breath away,” Kristoff said, meaning it truly and genuinely from the bottom of his heart. Anna beamed at him, feeling both unparalleled awe and unparalleled respect boiling deep within her soul. She regarded him now. The way the left side of his smile cocked up more than his right, sending him into an eternal mischievous smirk. The way his brown eyes always somehow teemed with an unusual mixture of curiosity and warmth. He was her rock. Her ocean. Her world. And she knew that the same was true for him. She was his rock. His ocean. His world.

Anna tried to put all of those feelings into words. “You—I need you to know that you’re—uh—perfect, Kristoff. Really perfect.” She used this word a lot. He doesn’t like it, he said. It’s not true, he said. He has his flaws, he said. But to Anna, even his flaws were perfect. So, he was perfect.

Kristoff smiled again. Mischievous still. But happy. Pleased. Tonight, he wouldn’t argue with her. He placed his hand on Anna’s swollen belly, rubbing gently. “I like this. Baby is free to be massive now.”

“Oh, shut up and help me put my dress back on,” Anna said through a laugh. “Might be a tough task since my waistline has expanded probably five sizes.”

“I’m up for the challenge.” Kristoff said, pulling desperately hard on either side of her dress before he could button them together. Eventually, he managed. Sure, the button stretched a bit and it threatened to pop off, but he thought maybe it would hold. At least for that evening.

“How do I look?” She gave him a twirl, settling in closer to him and cupping her belly slightly. She loved showing it off. The exciting proof of their future. Of what would come in May. “Ugh. I don’t wanna keep this a secret anymore. This is awful. How I lasted this long—it’s torture! Kristoff! Encourage our little one to make its presence known. Please, please, please.”

He smiled at his wife, dropping to his knees. Rubbing circles on her belly and planting gentle kisses all over before pulling away slightly, both hands still resting on the swell. Kristoff leaned in closer again and whispered, “Hey, little one…your mama and papa love you so much and want to tell the whole world how much we love you so we can celebrate you and love you publicly and—can you stretch out for us or move your little arms and legs or something? Mama and Papa are here for you, watching you grow… loving you…” He kissed her belly again. “We love you, little one.”

“Aww, Kris. You’re so cute.”

He stood up slowly. Waiting to see if it worked. Not that it had in the past… but still hopeful. Nothing. “You ready to go?”

“I’m ready to eat if that’s what you mean.”

They walked hand in hand through the castle hallways, still bursting with the beautiful harmonies of the choir, and finally through the doors of the ballroom. Each and every Arendellian guest turned to watch the Queen and King, or Prince—whatever—consort’s grand entrance. Some even started clapping. Clearly the party was already considered a hit.

Anna noticed out of the corner of her eye that a few of the women had started whispering to each other, their eyes glued to Anna’s midsection. Maybe even saying four people didn’t know was an overestimation.

Come on, little one. Move.

But still nothing.

Instead, Anna’s stomach growled, and she knew she needed to get to the food tables. Pronto. She saw Elsa there, too, finishing up the last of the ice sculptures. A reindeer looking much like Sven perched excitedly by the pickled herring. Perfect. Two birds, one stone.

Anna bounded up to her sister first, skipping in an unbridled excitement. Unfortunately, this excitement was almost purely due to the promise of stuffing lutefisk into her belly which made her mind want to stage a rebellion against her stomach at the very idea. But she paid no mind.

Her fabulous sister, first.

“Elsa, I’m so glad you came!”

Elsa laughed. Remaining calm, of course. As usual. She stood tall as Anna collapsed into her arms. “Of course. I wouldn’t miss your favorite night of the year.”

“Thanks for doing the sculptures, too. Everybody loves them,” Anna said, eyes drifting to the series of sculptures that adorned the space, catching a glimpse of a replica of her favorite snowman and smiling widely. “Especially giant Olaf at the dessert table.”

“That one’s my favorite to make.” Elsa took a step back, away from her sister by a couple paces. She took a moment to gaze intently at Anna, something that apparently had become the theme for the day, pursing her lips while deep in some train of thought. And then, suddenly, the corners of her mouth curled into a giddy grin. She closed the gap between them and whispered in Anna’s ear, “You’re glowing.”

Anna laughed. Elsa’s breath kind of tickled her ear. “I know, right?!”

“Is it weird if I say that I think pregnancy suits you?”

“Whoa, Elsa. That is way out of line. And you said the word pregnant? Shame on you!” Anna’s voice got dramatically low when she uttered the taboo word she didn’t actually think needed to be taboo.

Elsa blushed. “Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

“I’m kidding, Elsa! I agree with you. Will come in handy—you know—because we want lots of babies and everything,” Anna said. “I love the word pregnant, too. It’s so much easier and less awkward than the whole with child or in the family way nonsense. Like talk about beating around the bush. Jesus.”

“You hungry?”

“Oh, God yes. Thanks for reminding me.” Anna turned, reading to make a beeline for the lutefisk. But then she chuckled slightly and spun back to face her sister. “You’ll never guess what I want to eat, though.”

“Uh—herring?”

“Lutefisk.”

“Lutefisk? You—Anna—want to eat lutefisk?”

“I legitimately want to stuff twenty-five pounds of lutefisk into my mouth right now.”

Elsa laughed in pure shock. “You’re right. I never would’ve guessed.”

“I don’t know if it’s the salt or the disgustingly chewy yet soft consistency that’s getting me going, but it’s doing it. I’m feeling all tingly thinking about it.” Anna shuddered involuntarily How did that sound so good? Truly how? Repulsive. Lutefisk was nothing short of repulsive. “Can you help me fill some plates full?”

“I think your King already has you covered.”

Kristoff, goofy grin plastered on his face, approached the sisters with three plates full of lutefisk and potatoes precariously perched on top of each other. Somehow his left hand held two full glasses of mulled wine.

He passed her a glass of wine and one plate of lutefisk to start. “For you, my love.” He handed the other glass of wine to Elsa who graciously accepted.

Anna attacked the plate. Slurping down the fish in record time. Her face twisted in to some kind of combination of a gag and a smile. “Oh God this is truly horrendous.” Gulp. “Horrid. No…disgusting.” Gulp. “And so grossly…slimy?” Gulp. One plate down. Kristoff handed her the next one. “But also… man oh man does it really hit the spot.”

“I always liked lutefisk,” Kristoff said, taking a piece for himself.

Anna stopped what she was doing and shot daggers at him. “So this is your fault? Lutefisk and a massive … I swear we’re gonna find a way for the trolls to make you go through this next time.”

“You know you love it.” Kristoff smiled mischievously yet again. Taking another satisfied bite of the lutefisk.

Anna pouted playfully and grabbed one handful of lutefisk, flinging it directly into Kristoff’s face. “Trolls.” Another piece. “You.” And another. Kristoff had started opening his mouth to catch the pieces, swallowing in bliss with each successful catch and each delicious bite. “Next.” Anna tried to remain serious, but a smile was toying on her lips. Another toss. “Time.” The grand finale. Anna tricked Kristoff with a fake throw and tossed it into her own mouth instead. He furrowed her eyebrows and looked around, confused. Not having any inkling as to what actually happened. Elsa had started cracking up. Those two. Always getting up to some kind of ridiculous antics.

Anna couldn’t contain her laughter anymore and it came spilling out quickly to the point where she could barely catch her breath. She felt something like gas bubbling in her stomach and tried to calm herself, worried she had upset the whole peace of her body by gorging herself with food and then laughing too hard. But she didn’t have any burp in her… curious. Gassy without gas. Once she had successfully quelled her laughter, she started feeling it again. Gas … or bubbles … or butterflies teeming in her stomach?

Or…

OR…

OR!

Anna outwardly gasped. One hand immediately shot to her abdomen and the other covered her mouth.

Elsa and Kristoff both looked at her curiously, both cocking their head in the exact same way.

“Oh my God it’s happening!” Anna squealed, bouncing up and down so frantically that her mulled wine kept spilling over the cup.

They continued to look at her, confused as ever.

Both her hands rested on her stomach now. “It feels like… all of Elsa’s ice fireworks are going off in here!”

Now Kristoff and Elsa understood. Their eyes widened, they audibly gasped.

Still bouncing, Anna giggled. “Oooh tickly!”

“Anna?!” Kristoff ventured. She beamed at him and motioned him closer. He wrapped one strong arm around her and pulled her in for a hug, other hand staying low, secretly stroking her stomach.

She whispered in his ear. “Can you feel it? Can you feel our little one? At least…I think that’s what’s happening. I’ve never felt anything like this before. I mean gassy but—not gassy…” Plus, mother’s intuition? She just knew this was it. The Quickening. Finally!

He shook his head. “I don’t feel anything. But—I think that’s normal? I can��imagine it takes a while to feel it on the—outside,” Kristoff said, still close to her, hand still firmly on her belly. “But you feel it. Anna, it’s—wow. It’s real. This is happening. I’m so—I’ve never been more—this is the happiest I’ve ever felt.” He kissed her, passionately, on the lips.

“Me too,” Anna said as she pulled away, looking longingly into his fiery brown eyes. Another little flutter resonated through her and she giggled. Pressing her hand and thus Kristoff’s hand deeper into her stomach. “I wish you could feel it.”

“Someday.” He kissed her again.

“Screw the troll idea. You were right. This is so cool. Totally worth the lutefisk cravings.” Their laughter was interrupted by Elsa’s hands looping over both of their shoulders, hugging them tightly. Excitedly.

“Kristoff, Anna! Congratulations. Both of you.”

“Aww, thanks, sister,” Anna said, chuckling into her smile. Noting that Elsa’s cheeks seemed markedly more flushed and she wondered if the mulled wine had already gotten to her. “Wait.” Anna started bouncing again. So enthusiastically that neither Elsa nor Kristoff could keep holding onto her. “This means we can tell people! Oh my gosh can we tell them tonight? Can we, can we, can we?”

“How about right now?”

“Right now?” Anna’s voice cracked. “Right now right now?”

“Let’s go.” Kristoff held out his hand and Anna grabbed it quickly, forcefully. With all the intent in the whole world.

They raced to the small stage where the choir and the band performed. Their royal presence was enough to stop the singing mid-phrase, choir members bowing at attention.

“You don’t need to do that,” Anna said. “Your singing is beautiful, by the way. Thank you for being here. Uh—we just wanted to make an announcement. If that’s okay, of course. We can wait!” Somehow, Anna’s extreme giddiness was still manifesting as a constant and consistent bounce.

The choir singers looked at each other with what Anna perceived as knowing glances, and then nodded for the King and Queen to proceed.

They took center stage, Anna still bouncing, hand-in-hand. “Uh—hello, Arendelle! We wanted to take the time to thank you all for coming to the annual Christmas Ball. We hope you’re enjoying the food and the music and the holiday merriment! We are so happy this has become a tradition, and if I do say so myself, this might be the best ball yet. And not only because of—well, the ball… as of well—tonight, actually, Kristoff and I can finally announce that …” Anna took a moment to scan the crowd of eager faces. Maybe there were more than four who had no idea. “We’re having a baby!” Anna squealed and then screamed, raising her arm and thus also Kristoff’s arm into the air. Kristoff had also let out a few cheers. The crowd applauded, reaching a steady crescendo just as Kristoff picked Anna up and spun her around, giddily laughing, before bringing her face into his hands for a tender kiss. He then dropped to his knees in front of his wife, leaning in slightly, large hands now cupping her belly. Showing off her belly. Celebrating her belly. No more hiding. Just like Anna had wanted. He planted a tender kiss on the curve and the crowd cheered once again. Anna’s hands found their way into his hair and she ruffled it a bit, messing it up in a way she found exceedingly adorable. She turned back to the crowd, Kristoff still rubbing her belly in elation. “Baby Bjorgman is coming at the end of May!” Now Anna noticed a small corner of the crowd exchanging pieces of gold. Of course there had been some bets going on. She wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Kristoff stood up, kissed Anna once more, and then grabbed her hand, interlacing her fingers with his own. Anna took her other hand and cupped her belly, showing the crowd in more detail exactly how far along she was. Exactly. No mind games from any extra clothing. The buttons on her dress were still close to breaking loose. “Oh, and another thing! Maternity corsets are for the birds. It can’t be healthy to wear them all… tight and constricting and—” Without knowing how to control it, Anna shuddered a bit. So happy to be free. And safe. “Besides—let it all hang out, baby!” She did a little dance right then, shaking her rump and rubbing her belly. Laughter echoed throughout the crowd and then a whole conversation stirred. Anna hoped it wasn’t too judgmental… she didn’t want them to think she had taken anything too far.

But no matter. Kristoff was right. As Queen, she could make some rules. She could set some expectations. Even if not well received in the beginning, they could still hold weight.

Kristoff leaned in to whisper in Anna’s ear. “No more secrets.”

She smiled. Thank God. “Shall we celebrate?”

He nodded. “Let’s dance.”

The choir started singing again. The band joined in. The Holly and The Ivy, a Christmas classic. Merriment abound. Merriment all around. Although Kristoff and Anna took the lead, dancing alone for a few minutes, eventually more and more guests joined in. A little bit of Hallingdansen, a lot bit of pols, and the most bit of Kristoff taking advantage of the fact that the whole kingdom knew how overjoyed they were with the news of their growing family by essentially hardcore smooching in the middle of the dance floor. Their tongues had a good time dancing the Halling, too, and they paid absolutely no mind to the fact that all eyes were on them. Maybe the mulled wine was getting to them, too, or perhaps it was simply euphoria. Between the kisses, Kristoff frequently dropped to his knees to kiss Anna’s stomach or rub excited circles over the curves during the dances. Anna giggled each time, noticing that the flutters seemed to come in more enthusiastic waves when Kristoff’s hands or lips came in contact with her belly.

This felt good. To finally have the freedom to really celebrate. True bliss. True happiness. The best of all the past Christmas Balls. And they had a feeling no future ball could ever compare.

[onewaigu]

Soulmates

Genre : soulmate!au

Theme : fluff

Pairing : Harin(Onewe) X Reader

Description : people your age were thinking about who their soulmates were. you were more interested in a certain boy who already knew who his soulmate was.

The concept of soulmates having their fates intertwined together by a common connection seemed like something out of a fairytale. Since your whole life, you had become accustomed to seeing people find their soulmates. Which always left you wondering, when were you going to stumble upon yours?

As if someone was listening in on your thoughts, your foot got caught in a pavement hole which sent you stumbling. You closed your eyes to brace the impact but it never came. Instead, an arm firmly curled itself around your waist and pulled you back to your feet. There was no need to turn around to know who this person was because as soon as you heard a strangely familiar laugh, you instantly knew it was your bestfriend, Ju Harin.

He slung an arm around your shoulders and slowed down his pace to match yours. He was towering over you so you had to look up to meet his face which annoyed you sometimes.

“Clumsy as usual”, he humoured while showing off his pearl white teeth.

You punched his arm lightly and shook your head at the insult.

You loved having Harin as your bestfriend because not only was he kind but he was also easygoing. Always managed to make any day better just by his witty and funny jokes.

Sometimes you wonder if there was ever a chance for your friendship to become more than it was if the world didn't depend on the idea of soulmates. People would be free to feel whatever they wanted towards whoever they wished to be with. That's the reason why to you, the concept of soulmates sucked.

It sucked even more because you knew Harin had already gotten glimpses of his soulmate while you only dreamt of homework and stress. On the inside, you were kind of jealous of the girl that would end up with him. Although, if it really was meant to be, then you promised to abandon any feelings you had for him.

“You would not believe what I dreamt about last night”, he told you excitedly.

“Is it about your soulmate?”, you teased him and wiggled your eyebrows suggestively.

Even though you didn't want to talk about soulmates, you felt bad dismissing Harin's excitement so you had no choice but to resist the painful throbbing in your heart.

“Yeah, I actually saw her face!”

Ah. It hurt.

“Well that's good, right! Now you could go meet her and hey, you could even ask her out on a date”, you masked your sadness with a smile.

“I'm a little nervous to reveal myself to her because she's someone I know”, he mumbled softly as an obvious shade of red crawled up his neck.

“You're lucky she's someone you know, mine's probably some creepy pervert”, you shuddered in disgust at the possibilty.

“Hahaha I really doubt that, Y/N”

“I'm just saying, there's a possibility”, you exclaimed without any hint of seriousness in your voice.

After that, the two of you just talked about random stuff till you reached the school buiding.

The rest of the day was boring. Everything waskill the usual routine. When you got home though, you had the greatest shocking news of your life.

Through a text message from your best friend, you got to know that he was going to ask his soulmate on a date. You were frustrated. He only saw her face once that day and now, he wanted to go out with her without taking his time to think over it. As much as you were happy for him finding his soulmate, you couldn't just ignore your feelings. You sunk your head into your pillow and that was how you spent your entire night, crying over a broken heart till you fell asleep.

Drums.

You jolted awake in the middle of the night. Sitting upright on your bed, you placed your hand on your forehead in confusion. Was that a glimpse of your soulmate? Whatever it was, you buried your face in your hands as you sobbed quietly. The last sign of hope that Harin was your soulmate was gone because..Harin didn't play drums.

You dreaded the moment you had to face Harin in the morning.

It wasn't making it easier for you when Harin kept on approaching you more than usual. He was an absolute nervewrack. He would stumble on his words and constantly shake his leg. He told you that he was honestly nervous and afraid the date wasn't going to go well. Giving him a gentle squeeze on the shoulder, you reassured him that whatever he had planned, you were sure that anybody would fall for him.

Like that, the rest of the day went by in a blur. You were trying hard not to think about Harin's date while he was busy panicking over it.

Once you were home, you immediately entered your room and plopped yourself on your single-sized bed. You were exhausted and drained but as soon as you heard a notification on your phone popped up, you rolled on your bed lazily and reached for your phone. Swiping the screen, you saw that you had a message from Harin. Glancing at the time, you were confused because he should already be on his date. Without thinking much, you read the message.

Hey Y/N, could you come over my house? I need some help preparing for the date :)

You typed furiously before clicking send. When that was done, you got up from your bed and grabbed your black hoodie that was hanging from a chair. Slipping it on, you left your apartment to go somewhere familiar with the image of your reply still in your head.

Sure, Harin :)

Knocking on his door, you hid your shaky hands in your pockets. Why were suddenly feeling nervous? It's not like it was your date-

The door clicked and opened to reveal your bestfriend, Ju Harin. Just like that, you were speechless. No words could truly describe how handsome he looked standing in front of you. He didn't need a suit and tie to look good. Cladded in a simple striped t-shirt and plain jeans, Ju Harin had completely taken your breath away by his charms.

“Uh Y/N?”

You unfroze yourself from your daydream. You could've sworn you saw a little smirk.

“You needed my help?”, you tried to sound cheerful.

“Mhm, could you put this blindfold on?”, he hummed as he unclenched his fist to reveal a black cloth.

Before you could question him, he explained that he wanted the date to be perfect so he wondered if you could stand in for his soulmate for a dry run of the date. Truthfully, you applauded his dedication to planning a perfect date even if you weren't his date. So in the end, you agreed.

You wanted to grab the blindfold and wear it yorself but Harin beat you to it. He shifted behind you and wrapped the black cloth around your eyes, tying it at the back. You felt yourself stiffened as his fingers brushed the your ears lightly. You mentally scolded yourself.

“Okay, I'm going to bring you somewhere now”, he whispered in your ear, his close proximity caused your cheeks to blush.

You couldn't see anything but you did feel Harin locking hands with you. You took in calm breaths.

It didn't take long before you finally stopped getting dragged by Harin.

“You can take them off now, Y/N”, he said.

Fumbling with the knot, you took the blindfold off your eyes. You had to blink a few times for your eyes to adjust to the surroundings.

When it did, time stood still. His normal living room now had beautiful fairylights hanging on the walls. The dining table at the side had vanilla-scented candles and a vase filled with baby's breath. The atmosphere of the whole living room was perfect for a chill yet romantic date. Your heart involuntarily clenched.

Harin, who was at your side, walked to the middle of the room. How you didn't notice it at first was a mystery but there it was, a drumset sitting in the middle. Your eyes shifted to Harin who had drumsticks in his hands.

“So here's the part where I tell you that I lied“

“Y/N, I didn't need your help with the date cause you are my date”

You didn't understand.

“Remember how I said she's someone I know? Did you ever think about the fact that the only girl I've ever talked to..is you?”

“Dammit, Y/N..you're my soulmate”

“I don't care if your soulmate isn't me, I just need you to know that I've been in love with you since the day you stood up for me against others”

Blinking your eyes, you felt a tear falling. You didn't realise you were crying this whole time. It all made sense now and you felt your heart warmed by Harin's confession. All that worrying and it turned out that Harin's been your soulmate all this time. And you were his.

You were overwhelmed by emotions but that didn't distract you from the sight of the drums. The only thing that didn't make sense to you. Why were drums in your dream?

“Ah, the drums”, Harin cheekily grinned.

“I kept it a secret because I didn't want you to think I'm lame”, he scratched his head with his drumsticks.

Wiping your tears from your eyes, you smiled softly at Harin, “You're absolutely amazing, Ju Harin”

His face reddened in an instant but he kept his composure. “Uh- so with everything planned, I think it's time for me to make you fall for me”, he shyly looked away from you.

Now, it was your turn to blush because that sounded really familiar as if someone he knew had said that to him the other day.

[a/n]

someone was craving for some harin content 🤷‍♀️ of course I was tempted to write something fluffyy > <

stan weus and ju harin please stahp being rude boi

[composereggwrites]

Imprint Zine: New Creators’ Spotlight

This is my full article for the twewy @imprintzine!!! There’s still digital copies available of the full zine, and some merch left too!!! It was a blast to write and work with the other participants!

If you like this and wanna chat with me about it hit me up here or in my twewy discord!!!

Ao3

NEW CREATORS SPOTLIGHT

Hello again readers, and welcome to this month’s New Creator Spotlight! We find up-and-coming artists of all types to highlight! From fashion, music, and art, we know how to find the hidden talent in Shibuya and illuminate them all for you to see!

Mr. Mew Creations

First up is Mr. Mew Creations, a new fashion brand led by the fabulous Eri and Shiki Misaki. This duo has taken the fashion scene by storm with their innovative ideas and inspiring designs. From dresses to bright three-piece suits, these two push the boundaries of how we define outfits.

The star of their debut collection is a marvelous dress suit! It’s a dress, and a suit, combined into one! The top half is styled as a silken tuxedo jacket in bold fuchsia, with a pale lavender undershirt and iridescent pearl buttons. The bottom half, however, is a skirt designed to evoke the image of an elegant ball gown. The slip is comfortable enough to wear all day, while providing a backing to the outermost layer, which is a cascade of feathers dyed a stunning cobalt blue.

They have a myriad of other pieces in this lineup, going beyond the binary while staying fashionable and comfortable. From a simple purple shirt with embroidered orange foxes along the hem, to a yellow sweater with a detailed pink squirrel on the front, there’s a wide variety to choose from!

We sat down with the girls for an interview in their studio to talk about their threads, and they had a lot to say!

Thank you for interviewing with us. Could you both introduce yourselves for our readers?

Eri: Yeah sure! Thank you for interviewing us! I’m Eri, the lead designer of our two-person team, Mr. Mew Creations! I do most of the conceptual work, putting ideas down on paper and seeing where that gets us. Shiki definitely helps with that, but her talent shines in, well-- She can tell you!

Shiki: Hah, yeah! I’m Shiki Misaki! I’m the seamstress, so I made all the outfits you can see here in our workspace! Taking what Eri gives me, I bring our ideas to life! We’re both good in each other’s field, but together it feels like we’re unstoppable. She’s handed me some amazing designs to work with, and some I never thought I’d be able to turn into reality. The star of our show, the dress, was one of those. It almost ended up in the trash on more than one occasion, actually. We had to completely redesign it multiple times because we’re both perfectionists, and because someone sees the laws of physics as a challenge to beat. Eri likes to see how far we can push things past their limits, but we work best together because I can reel her back in if it goes too far.

We’re glad you two make such a good team! What led you to make the half-dress, half-suit outfit?

Eri: We wanted to design something that ignored gender norms. Something that defied them, without defaulting to a vaguely-masculine, androgynous look. The fact that clothing is gendered is ridiculous, and there’s this idea that men’s clothing is the default when you want a “gender neutral” item. We decided to go in the opposite direction, and add as much gender as we could, without being limited to one gender.

Shiki: It, like most of our line, is inspired by one of our friends. This dress was originally designed for him, before we decided to use it as part of our lineup. Gender is weird, and the society we live in makes navigating it more confusing than it needs to be. To be able to wear what you want, without worrying about the perception others have of you, without worrying about the way you’ll be labeled? That’s the ideal we strive for, and we hope our work can make a difference.

You said your friends inspired your line. What can you tell us about your creative choices?

Eri: Our friends are unique individuals, and we are too, so we know how to take a look at what people want, and what they need. Not everyone has the perfect model body. Not everyone wants to wear the high-fashion bling, or keep up with all the latest trends. The trick is to find what people want to wear, and design that, instead of chasing what’s trendy. If it’s stylish, people will want it, but it has to look nice and fit right.

Shiki: Just because something is comfortable, doesn’t mean it can’t have style. People are going to notice if you’re not at ease in the clothes you wear, and that unease ruins otherwise perfect appearances. We custom make everything here, and as the seamstress it’s my job to take what Eri gives me for the design and bring it to life. Doing that, while taking sensory issues into account, and ensuring nothing irritates the person who will be wearing it, is of the utmost importance.

Can you tell us a bit about  yourselves and your brand? How you got started, or where your mascot came from?

Shiki: Oh! Our mascot, Mr. Mew, was the first thing I ever made. I still have the original, and I carry him around with me. My quality of work has improved a lot, but he’s a big comfort item. He helps me face all the big scary monsters of the world, and I want him to be there to help others too.

Eri: We met when we were younger, back in middle school. I’ve always been good at making friends, but Shiki was a lot more shy then. Actually, we got in an argument, once when we were 15. I was so worried, I thought I was going to lose my best friend forever over a misunderstanding. Thankfully, we worked it all out, and here we are now! She’s a wonderful seamstress, and all of our friends are so supportive, so it’s nice. I don’t think we’d be where we are today without each other, and the help of everyone in our lives.

 It’s clear that these girls put lots of effort and dedication into what they do!

These girls offer more than some great threads! The namesake of their brand, Mr. Mew, is an adorable cat, and you can get merchandise of him too! Show off your love by picking up one of their plushies, cat ear headbands, and more!

Check out their full line at https://MrMewCreations.Com

 Neku Sakuraba

The artist of the month is none other than Neku Sakuraba! If you’ve taken a walk around Shibuya, you’ve already seen his stuff! This graffiti expert has been gaining a name for himself with stunning displays of color and intricate designs. If you frequent 104 or Molco, you’ll have seen his stylish bold lines on ads for some of the stores!

He first started making waves in the art world last December, when he put up a mural in the Miyashita Park Underpass. Dubbed Hachiko’s Guardian Angel by the public, it features a glowing figure standing over Hachiko, with white feathery wings stretched out over Shibuya’s night-time skyline. There are people at the base of the statue, and musical notes fill the outer space. We reached out to Sakuraba himself for commentary, and managed to secure an interview in his studio!

The space was big, half-finished paintings and sketches scattered across the room. Cans of spray-paint, colored pencils, and charcoal were everywhere. Interestingly, we also spotted a couple Mr. Mew plushies laying around. A second guest, a friend of Sakuraba’s who insisted on being called Joshua, was also in the studio.

But without further ado, the interview:

Thanks for welcoming us to your studio! Can you give us an introduction?

Neku: Right, hi, thanks for interviewing me. I’m Neku Sakuraba. Music geek, CAT fanboy, unwilling follower of fashion trends. That one over there [he gestures toward his friend] is Joshua. Please ignore everything he says. He decided to be here for “moral support,” but I think he just wants to tease me.

[Joshua, at this, gasped, and said, “I would never!” but as requested, his further commentary has been cut from the interview.]

Got it! What inspired you to start making art?

Neku: I’ve always been a doodler. My mom has artwork from back when I was six. The big moment of inspiration for me, when I went, I want to do this, was when I saw CATs art. Looking up at the mural in Udagawa for the first time, back when I was ten, I felt a spark, and I haven’t let go of that feeling since. It’s been rough, I’ve struggled with mental health issues, but art has always been a solace in the dark. I never thought I’d make it this far, or get as much recognition as I have. It’s amazing, and wonderful, and terrifying all at once.

You first got popular because of the mural you put up last December, in the Miyashita Park Underpass. Can you tell us anything about it?

Neku: Oh, yeah! It was the first mural I’d ever done, and I drew a lot of inspiration from Shibuya. In my head, I’ve nicknamed it Shibuya’s Composition. The piece is loosely based off a dream, if I’m being honest. The glowing white figure in the center, with the wings, is meant to be a guardian of Shibuya. Someone who helps the city grow. Meanwhile, the people at Hachiko are waiting for their friend to show, but he can’t, because he’s watching from above, protecting them from afar.

Fascinating! Do you feel like there’s a story you can make from that, one you might tell in the future?

Neku: I don’t think this is ever going to be a story or comic, unfortunately. It’s more of a personal piece. A few years ago, I only had one friend, my first friend, but I lost him. When he died, I isolated myself, and it took a lot from some special people to draw me out of that shell. Even now, I wish I could see him again, and the idea of him still being out there, watching over me and my new friends, comforts me when I miss him the most. I guess I’m like Hachiko, waiting for a dead person to come home.

I’m sorry for your loss. Can you tell us anything about your other artwork?

Neku: I do a lot of graffiti-style works. There’s no other big murals out there by me yet, but I’m working on a few designs right now. People have commissioned me to do stuff ranging from tattoo designs to album covers and store promotions. One of my favorite things to do when I make art, though, is to take the mundane and re-imagine it as something mystical. Why can’t you make foxes purple? Who says there isn’t danger lurking in the shadows? What’s stopping me from adding fire and lightning as weapons, from creating fantastical fights?

Another big source of inspiration is Shibuya. I’ve grown up in this city, it’s my home. If I can look around and see things others don’t? Then I can put that down on paper. Whether it’s as simple as catching the neon lights illuminating the Scramble, or the leaves falling around Hachiko, I can see that, pull it apart, and let my imagination run wild.

That’s pretty cool. You mentioned doing album artwork earlier, so can you tell us what it was like to design the cover for the latest album by The Albatross?

Neku: It was fun! I can’t tell you anything about them, obviously, but it came as a shock when they asked me if I could take on this project. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense. But what I can say, without getting myself vaporized on the spot, is that it was enjoyable, and they’re fun to work with. Even if they’re kinda a priss. The amount of artistic freedom I had was nice, and I think we collaborate well together. So there might be more partnership between us in the future, but nothing’s certain yet.

Wonderful! With that, one last question: what motivates you to create?

Neku: Art has always been an escape for me. It can be pretty, or loud. It can shout your thoughts from the rooftops or disguise them under the rustling of leaves in the wind. You can influence others with it, if you’re lucky. I create art for myself, first and foremost. But if I can provide a glimpse into my own secret garden, and let others see pieces of who I am in my work? Then I’m glad. I want to share it. I want to make my mark on the world, and provide others with the escape I once sought.

 This up-and-coming young artist is going to be a big name someday! With his talent, dedication, and heart, Neku Sakuraba might just be the next CAT!

If you want to support him, you can find information about him, his store, and his commission prices at https://nekusakuraba.com

 The Albatross

Our final creator of the month, someone a bit less new, but never interviewed, is The Albatross! Their first album, Noise, featured CAT artwork on the cover: an albatross in flight, with TV static cutting through the image. These two are a mysterious duo, but The Albatross takes the title of most elusive. Despite gaining fame from fans latching onto CAT art, The Albatross has never given the public a single word.

Until now, that is! With their second album, Pulse, set to release in a couple of weeks, they have consented to an interview for the first time!

The album artwork was done by Neku Sakuraba, and it features a feathered white wing, sprouting from the right-hand side of the image. Some of the lower feathers have been replaced with graffiti-like designs.

As for the music itself, their first album featured orchestral tracks, heavy on the violin, alongside electro-punk tunes! Some were instrumental, while others had lyrics. Pulse is looking to be the same style, but rather than the dark themes of Noise, it contains brighter, more hopeful songs.

We went through a lot of paperwork, involving multiple non-disclosure agreements, and the interview took place over a call while they utilized a voice changer, but it was worth it! And we’re happy to share what we’ve learned with you!

Thank you for choosing to have your first interview ever be with us! Can you give us an introduction? Nothing too personal is required!

Albatross: You were the only ones I felt were trustworthy, and the only ones completely willing to honor my anonymity. Also, a friend may have bribed me into it with promises of ramen. As for introductions… I am The Albatross, composer of music, avid Tin Pin fan, and a nerd when it comes to all things Shibuyan. History, culture, the trends. I thrive off her, it’s like the city’s got a pulse that matches my heartbeat.

Shibuya is amazing, we agree. Can you tell us why you chose your alias?

Albatross: There’s a lot of symbolism in the albatross. The bird can be a sign of good luck for sailors, historically. In the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, though, one of the sailors kills an albatross, and thus it becomes a curse. He bears the burden as the other sailors hang the bird around his neck, reminding him of how he’s doomed them all. I’ll let fans keep speculating on why I picked it, though. I can’t give away all my secrets here.

Of course. We wouldn’t want you to spoil all the fun! How do you make your music?

Albatross: It’s amazing what you can do with technology! I know how to play the violin and piano, so any parts in my songs with those are actually me playing, but for the rest I use a few different music programs! For vocals, I outsource it to Shibuyan singers, but all lyrics are still written by me. In the end, I weave everything together, and finagle it so it fits.

Sounds like a lot of work. Where do you get your inspiration for it all?

Albatross: From Shibuya! This city has a life of her own. Feet tapping against pavement, voices reaching through the air, all the beeps and honks and the myriad of noises that resound in every corner; it all creates a rhythm, it creates music. Sometimes I’ll sit and let it all wash over me. The city holds so much, a million stories fighting for attention. They echo in my head, begging to be told, so I write them. I turn them into music in the hopes of expressing their messages for everyone to hear.

The tone between your first and second album has changed a lot, from what the previews are showing. Is there a reason for this?

Albatross: Yeah. I’m going to be blunt. When I wrote and released my first album, I was suicidal. Completely isolated from the rest of humanity, with no friends or good experiences to fall back on for comfort. My only outlet was music, and because I was so depressed and misanthropic, my work reflected this. I saw the world as poisoned, felt like people would never change, and thought my existence contributed to the negativity.

But now? I have friends. Someone entered my life, not quite of their own free will, but they stuck around. They dragged me into the sun, undoing all my self-sabotaging attempts, and they helped me grow. Helped me learn to see the good in humanity again. Shibuya is full of life, full of creativity, of people trying to do their best and help others. I wasn’t able to see it before, vision clouded with my own preconceived notions, but they… Removed the tinted glasses from my face, so to speak. And this is why my new album is more hopeful and lighthearted.

You mentioned mental health, just now. Are you able to elaborate on any of that?

Albatross: Mhm, I can. It’s not pleasant, but… Mental health isn’t talked about enough, even though it impacts so many people. I’ve had depression for years now. I still do. Some friends and a few bonding experiences doesn’t magically cure everything. There is no magic cure. What helps is finding people you can rely on when things get tough. If I lock myself in my apartment, I used to hide away for weeks. Now, though? One of them comes knocking after a few days, with ramen and orders to shower. Sometimes it can feel like you’re going to shatter into a million pieces. But instead of falling apart in secret and cutting myself on the shards of glass, I have people who hold me as I break, minimize the damage, and help me piece myself back together.

Recovery is not a straight line, and there’s no end to the winding trail you take. What’s important is having friends there with you. People who help you stand up when you stumble, who help you make camp when you need to rest. Find someone who makes you feel safe enough to fall apart. Someone who can be there to pick up the broken shards, and help you create something new and beautiful with the pieces.

 The Albatross is still a mystery to us all, but hopefully their words and music have reached those of you who need to hear them!

They don’t have an official website, but you can find The Albatross on your preferred music streaming service, or head to a local music shop to pick up their stuff! Don’t forget to pre-order their newest album, Pulse, and if you haven’t grabbed Noise yet, be sure to snag that too!

And that’s all for our New Creators Spotlight this month! Be sure to get next month’s issue for all our latest stories, and to discover the up-and-coming talents of Shibuya!

[lizzybeth1986]

Quick Thoughts on TRH Book 1, Chapter 3

• I'm hoping that if I have this chapter out early enough (doubtful, because compiling and organizing my screenshots takes time, and my drafts often don't save which means there are times I will have to replicate whole paragraphs from scratch. But fingers crossed!), I might try and do revisits of the first book. I did four of those chapters last year, and I think now - when we're looking at some of the stories told to us in Book 1 from a new lens - is a good time to explore that first book again.

• I hope the read more issue is resolved by now. It made posting quite hard the last time. In the meantime these are the tags you can block: #long post, #trh quick thoughts, #trh qts, #trh qt reblogs.

• Thanks a lot to @pixieferry for her Hana playthrough, @thefirstcourtesan for her Drake playthrough screenshots and the Abhirio YouTube channel for the Maxwell playthrough screenshots. Not much of those are up, because of lack of space to put up the pictures and the fact that this particular chapter wasn't specifically LI centric.

• Title: Your Kingdom Awaits.

Alternative Title: Tell Me What's Gestating in My Womb Today, Cordonia! A Cordonian Ruby? An Autumn Glory? A Granny Smith?

• Three chapters in and I'm getting more and more baffled by this story by the day. There's stuff I like. Some of the characters I still love. I have fun looking at the little hints, the bits of symbolism, the callbacks. I love theorizing what we'll be doing next! But all of this needs to be glued together by a coherent storyline and this just isn't it.

• Even if we push aside the gross inequalities in balance (re: character development), there's still so much that just doesn't make sense. Why is there so much rush. Why is everyone in this country (and outside) so invasive and entitled over this one noble's child? Why are we doing such insane scales of prep over a process that is in itself is so unpredictable? Why am I learning about Cordonia's allies/potential enemies in such a vague and shoddy fashion? And most of all what kind of bullshit Royal Council is this???

• But I'll elaborate on all those questions later. For now let's move on to the chapter!

• If you didn't buy the corgi in Book 2, they ask you if you'd like to buy it now at the beginning of the chapter. Possibly that may affect the entry of the second corgi in some way? Idk. 

• Esther, the Queen of Cordonia is also still the queen of winging it. You'd think they'd have planned a look for her (esp given the amount of time they could spend on the train) and gotten her ready by the time they reached there, not scrambled around for an outfit the minute they reached Valtoria.

• The LI tells the MC that they're fixed an appointment with the best obstetrician they could find, and we will be going there to ask our preliminary questions plus get a check up. I was wondering if in Hana's case they would be going to a fertility specialist instead.

• In any case, Bertrand volunteers to help us with an outfit for the last time in a short while, because he's traveling to Texas to prepare for their wedding. (we're going there too, but later. I'm not looking forward to another round of Savannah-worship - possibly with an added side of Bianca-worship - no thank you).

• Bianca's ranch is called the Walker Ranch, after Jackson's last name. Why Jackson's?

• Our OOTD!

Electric blue with a gold belt and a black and white border on the neckline, accessorized with a necklace (I think it's pearls set in gold?) and a brooch pin in the shape of a crown.

I kinda like this one and knowing the way this team operates when it comes to outfits most of the time, I'm pretty sure the colour scheme was chosen on purpose. With this outfit, the MC is presenting herself in the national colours, with a tiny signifier of what her future role might be. Either as Queen or as mother of the future heir to the Crown. This is an outfit that would send a message during Liam's announcement, whether she is (symbolically) wearing that crown or not.

• I'm obviously not very comfortable with the implications that would go with that outfit (esp if she is not the Queen), but I can't deny it does its job.

• The MC can opt to go for either being poised, acting like a diva or being very casual in her approach. Whatever she does the crowd pretty much worships her.

•

So everyone except Liam has someone (media, a fan, common people) approaching them as a way of showing how famous and revered the entire group has become in Cordonia. Liam doesn't need one coz he's anyway getting his moment with his big speech in front of the Valtoria manor.

Drake - Donnie Brine from the CBC speaks to Drake, positioning him as a man of the masses, the person that the Cordonian people see as their representative. Drake is woefully unprepared and freezes, blurting out that "things are great" which probably might end up becoming a meme on Cordonian internet later. Random Cordonian Woman from Applewood saves him by confirming this statement even though her trees have yet to grow and the tax problems are pretty much making her life "not great".

Maxwell - Where are Jiro and Camellia from Applewood? I like little Marco and Valerie but I hope they're not the only kids PB is going to be showing every time they need to show children. Marco approaches Maxwell and the MC both to sign his copy of Maxwell's book, and Maxwell takes care to do a dramatic signature that will not "obscure the picture of his face". I'm giggling at that image.

Hana - Valerie approaches Hana with a handmade flower necklace, presumably with a pattern made from "the Lee family crest". Now either Lorelai's family in Cordonia have the same surname as Xinghai, or Xinghai got himself a house crest for some reason. Either way, to toss out a detail like that so casually (a family crest is something that passes down through generations, esp in noble families) without even thinking of the logistics of it...(when an entire book of yours has been dedicated to sigils and crests) is pretty lazy.

BUT. In good news this means that my longtime speculation that Hana's mother's house had flowers as part of their court of arms is correct! (I was also right about a couple other things, like Maxwell's ancestors and Liam's mother being alive when Olivia was brought to the palace. YAY! 😁)

• We now move on to Liam's public announcement. Which sounds kinda weird whichever way you look at it. A married Liam announces that he and his wife are on a mission to enjoy babymaking and a single Liam announces this:

(Screenshots from a Hana playthrough by @pixieferry)

I will translate what both Liams are saying into Cordonian:

Married Liam: We don't have an apple cinnamon bun in the oven yet, but we're definitely having fun kneading that dough nudge nudge wink wink.

Single Liam: I'm neither making apple buns nor kneading dough. I'll leave that to my friends the bun-making experts here. I'm just gonna park my butt outside the oven door along with the rest of Cordonia.

Sounds weird? You're welcome. It was meant to sound weird.

• Esther finally reunites with her corgi Joy! I wonder if at some point she'll meet up with her horse Celestia and red pandas Hansel and Gretel too xD

• Mara tells me safety checks have been done, but...it's Mara saying that, so I'm not sure I'm quite convinced. The alternative is Bastien, so...we're kinda screwed I guess.

• The group then discusses the future foetus, and Liam takes this opportunity to hint at their childhood history. You know what that means? DIAMOND SCENE!!

•

(Screenshots for Asian Liam from my playthrough, Black Liam from @pixieferry and White Liam from @thefirstcourtesan)

LOOK AT THE WEE LITTLE KIDDIES AND LIAM'S MOM OMG AAAAAA.

As far as I can tell, among the kids the sprites for all three Liams and Drake are very much new, and the rest come from variations and changes to different faces. Maxwell's face is a copy of Simon from THoBM (only the mouth is slightly different), Hana's has a lot of similarities to young Kenna in TCaTF, but with pigtails instead of tiny buns. Olivia's is a little harder to place but I think there are plenty similarities between hers and RoE Camellia's face. For Queen Eleanor they used Young Mary's (MC's mother) sprite from D&D in accordance to whichever Liam you chose. Perhaps the only Mary sprite not used here would be the brown/Indian one, because Liam's ethnicities mainly feature White, Black and Asian. She even wears Mary's opera outfit (that incidentally Mary also ended up wearing to her wedding lol).

• Somehow they forgot that Maxwell was supposed to be a cute chubby little hippo who was loved by his mother.

• I'd like for Black Liam to grow more hair on his head because the curls on his younger self are lovely 😍

• Since most of the childhood tales revolve around the experience of growing up in the palace, this build up to the diamond scene begins with the MC asking questions about each of the boys (Liam, Drake, Maxwell).

- Little Liam and His Crown: Liam claims he only wore those during state occasions, but Maxwell (who admittedly didn't see Liam as much as Drake did but saw him often nonetheless) saw him practically sleep in the thing, and Drake has pictures to prove it lol.

- Grumpy Drake: Maxwell and Liam agree on Drake becoming grumpier as he grew older, but disagree on what metaphors to use to describe it. Maxwell favours "scratchy bark on a secretly loveable tree", and Liam claims he is "whiskey maturing in its barrell". ("oh", I want to ask Drake, "so that's what they call 'old grain mash' these days?" 🤣 This is my revenge for him referring to wine as old grape juice back in Book 2). No prizes for guessing which metaphor Drake liked better.

- Banning Maxwell from Palace Rooms: Maxwell's lucky he has a king for a friend because apparently before Liam jokingly and unwisely decided to give the man a royal pardon Maxwell was banned from all the good rooms 😅

• Hana clearly hasn't lost her touch when it comes to epic savagery. "I imagined you guys like the Three Musketeers, only...less French". 😅😅

• This diamond scene is split into three parts. You have the fun 'adventures' of the little boys (and later Olivia) at the palace, split in between by a slightly more sombre tale of little Hana's loneliness. The narrative voice in all three is very much that of a child, and focuses on Liam's and Hana's imaginations, so as to make their childhood stories more real to us while still providing us background information about the country's recent history (the "recent history" bit doesn't apply to Hana, though, since she is in China at the time).

- Pirate Adventures at The Palace Courtyard: Liam, Drake and Maxwell pretend to be pirate kings, battling rivals on the palace courtyard. After rescuing Maxwell from being stuck on the branches of a tree, the trio decide to continue their adventures on the gardens that are his mother's brainchild, but are stopped by a palace guard. Liam is briefly saddened by this, but is comforted by Drake and Maxwell. The boys then decide to continue playing in the palace kitchens. This scene begins by focusing on the antics of the little ones, but is really about the changed atmosphere in the palace that the boys themselves were too young to notice at the time.

(We also find out which place in TCaTF the Beaumonts originated from, since young Maxwell refers to himself as a pirate from Panrion in both scenes that he is in *cue Lizzy looking very very smug because I've been saying the Beaumonts were from Panrion/someplace in Ebrimel since way back in Book 2*)

The MC has options to respond to this tale (either about whether they were always this naughty, or about the increased security in the palace). In response to her question about the three of them, the boys tell us that Liam was known for being a free spirit and would skip many diplomacy meetings before he even met the other two (again, Constantine, Liam was A CHILD). If you ask the question they want you to be asking, however, about the increased security in the palace, Drake and Maxwell will tell you the security wasn't as strict earlier, and Liam will explain that the royal family had recently received threats at the time, and his parents were a lot more tense and on-edge than usual. Either way, you either get to know a bit about the political atmosphere at the time, or realize that little Liam wasn't the heavily burdened one we met on that first night in New York.

- Pretend-Teatime with a Young Hana: Hana continues on this thread of conversation by focusing on the bond between the boys, commenting on how she never grew up with that kind of experience. To which Drake and Maxwell have these reactions:

@Drake, pls fall on a cactus.

@Maxwell. Honey. She said this to you yesterday. She's probably said this more than once. You've seen her parents!! Wtf kind of friend are you if you can't even take what she said seriously the first time?

@Hana pls get yourself better friends 😭

Like @callmetippytumbles said in her response to this scene, I have no patience for this kind of selective stupidity.

So Hana's scene is technically a call-back to something she once told the MC back in Book 1 Chapter 6, when they were on their way to the post-Derby tea party with Queen Regina. At the time, Hana spoke of her parents not allowing her toys because they thought them frivolous, and how she had to make do with whatever was lying around instead. We actually see this happen in reality here. We see her PoV of what her inanimate objects do, we see her practicing court etiquette on these objects with her tea set, and we see her leave space for her asshole mother even though Lorelai doesn't deserve that much respect or consideration. There is a lot to unpack in this scene and I want to do that in my General Thoughts section later on...but for now I'll just say that it broke my heart, and not just in an "oh poor Hana" way.

- The Attack from Lythikos: I love this sequence too, not only because it shows us Olivia, a younger Constantine and Liam's mother Eleanor, but because the narrative framing in itself alludes to what happened between Lythikos and the Capitol earlier through the pirate story. Liam and Olivia still speak in the language of their story, but the sequence actually plays out what happens in their real lives. Olivia attacks the pirates, but is left desolate, sword broken, at the end of it (just like her parents tried to, and died in the process - leaving an innocent Olivia alone without support). Liam offers her terms that would give her safety and protection, and in return, she asks to be Pirate Queen and for Drake's sword - which he reluctantly gives.

Constantine mistrusts Olivia and attempts to limit her natural abilities and instincts, but it is Liam's empathy, support and validation of her pain, that eventually makes her the steadfast ally that she becomes as an adult - not Constantine's paranoia. Had Liam followed Constantine's lead, the chances of Olivia falling into the trap of subscribing to her aunt's beliefs would have been much much higher, and Constantine would have found himself at the receiving end of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The narrative may also be implying how deep Eleanor's own impact on her son must be, long after her death, since the narrative frames him as adopting her way of dealing with situations often.

In any case the narrative allows us to see the children as they were before their individual tragedies changed them (except in Olivia's and Hana's cases - where they were still struggling to survive the situations they were in), and allows us to see what shaped them into the adults they are today.

The MC then gets to ask one of two questions: either why Constantine treated Olivia so badly, or about the arguments his parents were having. We learn from these that this incident was shortly after Liam became friends with her and his parents brought her to the palace (this references both Liam's conversation about Olivia to the MC in Book 1 Chapter 7, and Lucretia's complaints about Constantine "keeping Olivia hostage" in her diamond scene in Book 3).

• Possibly this may not be the only scene of its kind we will see. Possibly the next few may be Drake-centric, since we may actually meet Bianca in a few chapters. But these scenes may definitely have an impact on dialogue later, just like how learning of the assassination attempt in Drake's Italian Restaurant Scene and Eleanor's death in Liam's Fydelia Balcony Scene in Book 2 are referred to later (if bought) in the hospital scene with Constantine.

• In any case, we leave the past in the past (for now), and move towards Valtoria's throne room. Where we meet Penelope, just back from her first canine fashion show, Kiara who tells us she has everything kept under control (you always do boo 😍) and Madeleine who is all up our uterus.

• She mentions King Bradshaw from Auvernal and his "impossible to control" wife, then mentions a Queen Amalas immediately after without bothering to tell us where this person is from. WTF? At least tell me the name of her goddamn country if she's another person!! You'd just have to say Queen Amalas of ChickenFeetonia and I would understand.

• ...you're telling me the Queen of this country (in my playthrough) has barely looked at a map of the place she's ruling or checked out who rules what?? You're telling me that the Royal Communications Director is STILL going to give her a gazillion flash cards to read something that she could sum up in five minutes, at the very last minute? Bitch what have you been doing this entire time? Touching up your manicure??

•

@Penelope: No you're not.

@Kiara: STOP ENABLING HER, KIKI, AND GET YOURSELF BETTER FRIENDS.

@Madeleine: Pls fall on a cactus.

• Madeleine hasn't been here for even five minutes and already I've had enough of her entitled ass. "Little apple gestating in your womb"...just...I can't. Ugh. Get your nosy nose out of my oven!!

• Remember how I told you guys about how apple analogies may be used to denote fertility? (mostly because RoE spoke of this apple cutting ceremony and it was a very obvious indicator towards apple metaphors being used to describe pregnancy and childbirth).

• I facepalmed when Kiara agreed with her but she's also probably thinking "well see this is why they call me the smart courtier. I don't have to deal with this shit anymore and now you do" (she isn't wrong).

• WELL HELLO OLIVIA.

• She informs us that we're expected at the solarium. I have a solarium?

• Apparently it was Mara's honeymoon gift to us. More like her "sorry Bastien and I screwed up last book" gift, I'd say.

• So wait where was this roster Liam was speaking about in the last book's epilogue? I see one Cordonian noble and one Englishman who until my wedding wanted to have nothing to do with Cordonia, and who's now bleating "our country, our kingdom, we're under attack" like a panicking patriotic nanny goat.

• Why can I not see Emmeline here, who is clearly the expert on her duchy? (I mean like. Landon is nice, but I'd really like to see more women in this Council too). Also does Kiara's inclusion into the Council cancel out the presence of her father Hakim, who is a seasoned diplomat and might possibly have some really good suggestions for dealing with these foreign powers (and seriously he'd be a better option than Godfrey anyway).

• Now Esther has a suggestion! Let's see what it is...

• A royal ball, apparently. Which...given the company, I'm sure it probably would be appropriate but I'm pretty sure we'll need to have more than that in place. I'm pretty sure the people in this council should either be finding out whether the person making these suggestions knows anything about these issues or whether she is simply talking out of her ass. This was a problem last book as well. The MC rarely feels the need on her own to explore these situations more, is okay with just learning things last minute and rolling with it and has the same solution to everything. It's either tours or balls but very little actual exploration of the situation. (I mean there is even a point where she barely shows any empathy at Portavira - even though they're still reeling from a bunch of natural calamities - and thinks it's appropriate to tell them to come for her wedding anyway. No wonder Liam panicked and started giving her diplomacy lessons, stat!) I'd actually take the MC seriously if she were doing her research and her suggestions weren't so shallow and one-note.

• Hana is grinning and giving justifications like this suggestion makes sense. STOP. ENABLING. HER. HANA.

• I especially want to know what Liam's experiences with these dignitaries have been. Both last chapter and this one, I'm seeing him in a position where he is defiant and digging his heels into whatever ideas he is having, but I don't know the context yet and would like to make sense of that. From whatever I've read so far...Liam took the year following Leo's abdication to familiarize himself with taking the front seat in negotiations, and probably may have been familiar with this kind of situation and the kind of people involved even before he became Crown Prince. It makes me wonder how difficult negotiating with them has been, and I want to see why Liam is so done with these people, so fed up. We're missing some context here and I think learning at least a little more than these scraps would have been better for everyone.

• I like that they remember Kiara as the only one outside of the charmed six to get a seat in this council (Kiki deserves the best). I also liked how succintly she summed up Drake and Hana's points about what the heightened taxes are doing to the people as "a reminder that we're not just here for ourselves".

• I find the entire idea of Drake Walker being the sole commoner representative in the Council laughable, especially in a narrative where every other commoner barely has a face, hardly has a name, and almost never has a voice. A man who has spent a huge chunk of his life in a palace, and who I've hardly seen even interacting with a commoner in the story...I'm expected to believe he will have great insights on commoner issues?? Even in this meeting, it's Hana who does a better job explaining this situation (she's the one highlighting the tax issues) than he does. Then again this Council also somehow gave a seat to Duke Karlington - a man who literally never had Cordonia's best interests in mind last book, and who only ended up attending our wedding because we had to be brought in as family counselors to settle HIS family disputes (I mean lol Godfrey how can you call this wedding a disaster when it caused you to magically become so "patriotic"!)

For God's sake, I want to see other commoners on this council. I want people who are actually living these experiences highlighting their issues. This is an issue I have with the MC too. She started out a commoner herself a waitress who wouldn't even flinch at the sight of rats in a dumpster. For someone of that background and who has possibly lived under the worse circumstances than some Cordinians themselves, you'd think that she'd have questions and show interest in how the people who aren't owning lands and are regular individuals on the street live their lives, and whether things are okay for them. But she's so immersed in the world of nobility that she rarely ever even tries to come out.

• Before Liam takes into account everyone's points and comes to a conclusion, the MC has the opportunity to give them her opinion. She can either say that we can't trust anyone, which Godfrey agrees with, or that an alliance would be good for Cordonia, which Godfrey views as naive, OR (and I didn't expect to like this response but I actually do) that she's a waitress from the States, and wouldn't know all that much about this situation. To which there isn't much of a reaction as such, but that's kind of what seems different about this book compared to the others.

• Once the meeting is wrapped up, our LI and Maxwell/Hana whisper in a corner about a surprise they have in store, and take us upstairs to show us what it is. If you're marrying any of the other three, Maxwell is the one who has arranged and picked out themes and colour schemes for the nursery. If you're married to Maxwell, Hana takes over this role.

• Ooooh. New (I think!) baby music! Nice. Very lullaby-like.

• Every design has these basic components:

a crib with a pillow (which I think will be updated later)

a couch nearby, likely for comfort when the mother wants to breastfeed (the updated versions seem to have a footrest)

a table with a lamp

three empty frames (also to be updated. I'm guessing for one of those "my first hand/foot impression" kind of thing and maybe even photoshoots etc)

a ceiling lamp/chandelier

a hook, also on the ceiling.

The two updated versions have footrests, updated lamps and ceiling decorations, additional carpet and customized designs (except for the crib and the pictures and the hook, which I think will be updated later). The Royal Glam theme is all reds and golds, very luxurious and very Valtoria. The Fairytale Forest theme has more whimsy, with bears, foxes, leaves, flowers and apples on the wallpaper, wood paneling, a beautiful golden lamp. Very pretty. Both seem to reference the MC's journey in TRR: her being either a Royal and the closest thing to one, and her journey being very fairytale-like (remember, the same logic was used for Hana's "something blue" gift for the MC's - where she views her as Cinderella).

• Only problem is...who exactly buys a nursery before they have a baby! Especially considering how unpredictable pregnancy and childbirth can be.

• We now meet Dr Ramirez for an appointment. I'm not sure about her suggestion that prenatal vitamins etc they will deal with after she has conceived. I know a number of people who did pre-pregnancy appointments and vitamins and folic acid were on the top of the list of things they'd start a routine with.

• As expected, all the appointments go roughly the same, with the usual answers to the usual questions (one about sushi, another about morning sickness and a last one about potential complications). The MC and LI are in the clear, and can start preparing - but apparently shouldn't stress. LMAO. Thank you doctor, I'm sure that will be easy to do in this country 😂

• Hana's goes differently, and it's clear this doctor's visit was primarily written to address her situation with the MC. The tests go differently, the suggestions given to them are different, the questions the MC asks (one about choosing donors, when they should start, and who should carry the child). The bombshell that immediately follows this is:

Wow. Seriously. Wow. You couldn't find a more temporary reason for why the MC has to be the one conceiving? It has to be something that would make her overall ability to conceive almost impossible?? (and this we find after one test? No follow ups?) I recall someone putting up/reblogging these screenshots with a caption about how the narrative pretty much took Hana's entire ability to conceive from her, and it's so true - and so disturbing when you place it in the context of how they've dealt with her issues so far (more on this later).

• In Hana's playthrough, she struggles with implications of this news, but constantly tries to veer the focus back to "well at least one of us can is able to have this baby". Twice, she is shown moving away from her pain to ask about the other possibilities for the MC.

• Anyway...we now move to the next morning, when the couple wake up to bad news - and it's concerning the pictures taken during their honeymoon. Given that Maxwell/Hana is holding a magazine when they tell the MC they found out who was responsible...I wonder if it's one of our news outlets. Or whether it's a foreign media rep.

• So I guess this complicates things at our Ball, since we're already on thin ice and this news would have spread to those other dignitaries as well. So we're going to have to deal with whatever implications come with those pictures (perhaps a spin on the royal gang having fun while Cordonia is in a national crisis? Who knows. It would be hypocritical of Cordonians and people from other neighbouring countries to judge the couple over the babymaking that they themselves were enforcing on these two!)

• In any case...royal ball this week. And in the universe of PB's stories that usually means some shit will go down.

General Thoughts and Observations:

• The funny thing about the MC's responses now is that her heightened position now seems to allow her to get away with a lot more than she used to. Now if she gives a joke response, the media and people laugh with her rather than at her. If she is a diva, the crowd will lap it up. I'm guessing what the book is trying to imply is that these are the people she has won over and doesn't exactly need to worry about, and now the ones she will have to convince are from other, more powerful countries - ready to back Cordonia into a corner anytime.

• As you can tell by now, I absolutely loved the childhood sequences. They sounded like children, most of the narrative lines up with what was already said in the previous series, and there were some interesting narrative devices used here.

• I think the third sequence especially drives home the point about what Liam did right, even as a young boy, and what Constantine refusing to look past Olivia's lineage to see her as an individual could have cost him. Constantine's ruthlessness and lack of genuine care for his bonds/friendships (eg. Hakim) had him in a position where he was unable to relate to anyone beyond his own tiny bubble (even his own wife Regina was taking countermeasures to make the best of his horrid plan), and had him make decisions that did more harm than good. For instance, take what he did to the MC, for no fault of her own other than that he didn't think she'd be a good Queen. Not only was what he did utterly disgusting, but it also would have made his own family a subject of shame in the country (which is why Constantine practically begs her never to expose him, because then Liam would be paying the price). Imagine what would have happened if Constantine didn't agree with Liam and perhaps Eleanor, never brought Olivia to the palace, and Liam had never shown her his constant support. Liam's genuine empathy in this case pretty much ensured the safety of his own line.

• I also love the implications of that sequence. Constantine is so wrapped up in his fear that he tries to break what Olivia considers most precious (Zenobia the sword in this case, but this could allude to her parents' deaths and later, her possible marriage to Liam at his Coronation). Liam attempts to fill that gap by taking her in, caring for her, and giving her the tools to continue being the Lythikos fighter she has always been.

• There are a few TCaTF references in the palace scenes: Maxwell mentions Panrion twice, and Olivia calls her sword "Zenobia" in honour of her historical hero (she still speaks of Zenobia with something akin to worship during the Winter Festival in Lythikos).

• Olivia's dress is also modelled on Zenobia's, with the same colour and bodice embroidery. In fact most of the clothes are very similar to their adult garments: Drake still wears denim, Maxwell favours dark colours (still should have been chubby though), Liam's clothes are similar to his casual wear minus the ascot, and Hana wears pink, with flower designs on the skirt.

• What I like most are the narrative voices for both Liam and Hana, who are the ones narrating these stories, and how rooted in their imaginations the scenes themselves sound. But there are significant, heartbreaking differences in how we see their imaginations play out:

Here are a few samples of narration I've managed to save from Liam's PoV. Notice how Liam and his friends are so into their little game that they find adventure in everything? Notice the language they use to describe themselves and what they are doing? Once-defiant topiaries shaking in fear at their antics. "Liberating" chocolate tarts. "Conquering" the upper floors. These boys are playing out their dreams and showing us the kind of men they would want to be. The heroes. The victors. The ones everyone looks at with awe and reverence.

This is also not a story Liam is creating alone. Drake and Maxwell happily join in, sink into their characters and display their heroics alongside him. Olivia also joins in and holds her own, and when Liam's father tries to break her spirit, Olivia shows Liam her trust and faith in him by using the language of the game.

On the other hand, here is what the narration technique in Hana's tea scene looks like:

There is a lot to unpack here. A lot. There is perhaps more in this one scene of Hana's than there is in all of Book 3, where she was pretty much pushed to the sidelines.

We were told in Book 1 that Hana had to get creative because she wasn't allowed toys. This was told to us in a rather matter-of-fact way, by a person who was normalized in this way of life and who hadn't yet realized just wrong her upbringing was or how damaged her self of self was. It's perhaps easy to forget this bit of dialogue if you were reading it for the first time because at the end of the day it's spoken of without much gravity.

It's when you see it play out in front of you, in little Hana's voice, from an adult Hana who will now view this entire sequence very, very differently, that the tragedy of it all really hits you. At such a young age she is forced to make do with the little she has: the little she has in terms of things to play with, the little she has in terms of relationships. What the MC says after that sequence is half-right, it's sweet how Hana used her imagination in spite of her parents' rules and strict lifestyle. But what that misses is the burden experiences like that would place on a child in her earliest, more formative years. What stand out to me the most in this sequence are these:

- The most obvious: the use of a 'tea party' to teach herself etiquette and diplomacy. In the present, Hana tells the group that "a lot of what I learned about courtly negotiations, I learned from the tea table". This is the level Hana chooses to focus on after telling her tale, to soften the blow of the story itself.

- The fact that despite her mother's treatment of her, Hana still leaves space for Lorelai. Still wants to believe the best of her, still wants her involved in her life. Lorelai denies her her support and comfort, which is the initial layer to her injustices against Hana. In a lot of ways, even now - Hana is still leaving space for Lorelai, giving her chances to improve, trying to educate her on respecting her boundaries better. It's a long, exhausting process, and Lorelai doesn't deserve the many chances Hana keeps giving her, but Hana is also a person who struggles to completely cut off from the people in her life, controlling and emotionally abusive though they may be.

- At the end of the day, the objects she is giving a life and a personality to, are inanimate objects used for other purposes. Not toys, not real friends. Every last one of them. Miss Doily is kind and caring, Princess Sinckerdoodle is jealous and gives a damn about etiquette (I like how you can see allusions there to Olivia and the MC in the Bakery Ball dialogue!). But they're essentially all objects that cannot move the way her narration describes them as moving. Even dolls and toys, inanimate though they are, are made for the express purpose of allowing a child to participate in pretend play. They can be given a voice, their limbs can be moved, the child can easily turn such a space into an active space with the use of her toys. The doily, the napkin, the sock...these are things Hana will have very little actual control over. They will not be able to move the way she wants them to, do the things she wants them to. Everything has to be happening in her head and there is very little outlet for her other than the few things she has at hand (a similar example of of Hana using scraps we will also find in Book 2, where she draws whiskers on a rock to replicate a toy mouse).

Look again, at the differences in the way Liam narrates his tale and how Hana narrates hers. Liam's is also a fantasy, also uses inanimate objects. But supporting him in building this imaginary universe are his friends, and the parents who both don't stop him from immersing himself in this imaginary world, and have a safe normal (for now) life to return to when those "adventures" are over. On the other hand, Hana has to do the heavy work...in every way. She has to imagine not only the background of what is happening, but also what the objects in front of her are like, what they will do, how they will interact with her, how they will interact with each other.

If I had to replicate such a scene into film, the loneliness of this sequence would perhaps hit harder. A large, empty room. A tiny girl. A tea set and several strange items - and none of them actually move. She is sitting alone, in the dim light, in the silence, talking to these objects that will never respond so she pretends they do, just to chase away that yawning, aching feeling of not having a single friend. All she gets in return is silence. All she finds in front of her is space, and more space. The kind of space that could swallow a child in its emptiness.

And in the center, is a seat left empty. For a mother who doesn't believe her daughter is worth the time.

I think there will be very few who will appreciate the strength it takes to survive a lifetime of that, and that's sad.

• The little Hana sequence reminds me of the animated film Cinderella, particularly in how the main character uses dreams and imagination as an escape from her life of drudgery and the abuse she faces daily. Particularly the song "Sing Sweet Nightingale", where Cinderella's dull world bursts into vivid colour through the soap bubbles that emerge from the washing bucket.

It's a beautiful, soft, almost surreal little sequence...but when you strip it all down to its basics, what you're essentially seeing is a woman so abused by her family and so trapped in this life she does not deserve, that she has to grasp at straws to find joy. Or in this case, soap bubbles.

What Hana faces in her home is perhaps a little more similar to Rapunzel's situation in Tangled than Cinderella's, but there are definite similarities in the way both characters use their imaginations to soothe and comfort themselves. She is forced into a situation where her imagination - and these things that can't respond to her - are all she has, and the only ways she can keep herself safe and happy. That's way too big a burden for a child so young to bear.

• I wonder if there will be more than the memories. Perhaps documents, news clippings, research material that the MC can use to dig further into what's going on in this country. It's possible, but it's also possible that memories will entirely be how we unravel this mess. I was speaking to @thefirstcourtesan the other day and she mentioned that Bianca and Bastien would both be pretty good sources for finding out more - Bastien, after all, had a lot of respect for the second queen and was close to Jackson, and Bianca would have heard certain things from her husband or witnessed something at the very least (and if they were friends, that angle too). I probably would add Lucretia and maybe Anton (if we see them and if they cooperate), Bertrand or someone new who knew Bartamely (if we can find out more about the Beaumont house that would be lovely!), the Lees, and...Francesco? (I still haven't forgotten that Bertrand mentioned him as being a friend of Liam's mother). I also want to see what new information Olivia got from the last time she did her research on any hidden deals or laws that could endanger the kingdom. There are quite a few possibilities in terms of what we could find and how it can be presented, so I'm looking forward to that. This scene was a good start.

• Having said that, this was something they should have been addressing the previous book. If they hadn't spent so much of their focus on all the wrong things, we wouldn't have as much ground to cover as we do now. And I'm not sure they've learned their lesson enough that we will not see the same mistakes repeated this time.

• Why is the system in place to inform and update the MC on what's happening so poor this time. At least earlier, we'd have a fairly good idea of what would be happening next, even if some important stuff was done last minute. Now the explanations themselves are poorly formed and done without proper thought on whether the MC/readers might understand what's going on or not. It doesn't look good on the story, nor does it look good on those characters esp the MC. This is stuff she could have maybe gotten away with as a suitor. But now she is Duchess/Queen, and an influential figure. What looked good in her days as a suitor won't look so good on her now.

• The Royal Council could be a way forward - for the nobility and royalty-heavy narrative to something that shows us more perspectives from the people who really form the backbone of this country - the commoners who actually populate Cordonia's lands and duchies, whose hard work likely keeps the economy running. Just one Drake isn't adequate for that kind of representation - not when he very rarely addresses their issues in the first place. Please tell me there will be more in that Council because the Council as it stands is in no way an improvement on the status quo.

• I've said more than enough about how bizarre and downright OOC Liam sounds, but I do think we should not ignore the context - the fact that every single individual involved is making these demands of the MC and expecting her to save their country through her child without really checking if she has basic knowledge or other resources in place (such as information about the rulers she is meeting). That includes the LIs. It's very easy to make just a character or two a convenient scapegoat, but let's not forget that there isn't a single person in this entire narrative that is bothering to examine the implications. Not a single.

• What really got me angry...was the Hana doctor sequence. Maybe two books ago it would have just hurt - but more on the level of "it hurts to see Hana like this but I have hope for her". Hope that she would have the space to grieve something she had lost before she could ever even have it, hope that the narrative would validate her pain and encourage her healing. But I can't even hope for that anymore.

This is a very very painful, complicated situation to put a person in. And yes, sometimes those are things you want to talk about and finding out you can't have children when you've always wanted to have them is a very real, very difficult situation - and there is a lot you can explore in terms of how a person with these conditions would feel. But the thing is...Hana has already been on the receiving end of multiple tragic storylines. I have already seen enough and more of her in pain. What I'm not seeing is a good - or even adequate - payoff that validates her painful journey and allows for a release of those emotions. I'm constantly seeing more tragedy, less triumph. I'm not seeing enough satisfactory resolution to those many many issues, and I've spent three books just watching her hurt be brushed aside both by the people who bully her AND the people who are supposed to be her friends (let's be real, they're doing it even now). And now is supposed to be a good time to pile up another difficult situation on her???

• Whenever Hana has been forced into situations that hurt her, her emotions and thoughts have always been pushed to the sidelines - unless and until it was to elevate the MC to a pedestal in Hana's eyes. Hana has rarely - if ever - been given the space to speak out against injustices done to her, has rarely been allowed to have an opinion on people who have harmed her.

When the narrative should have been validating what Madeleine put Hana through, they opted to create sympathy for Madeleine instead...and had her completely minimize what she did to Hana ("I'm sure Hana will be willing to let bygones be bygones").

When the narrative should have been allowing her to discover what her sexuality was, they opted not to talk about it at all. They opted to make her MC-sexual instead. Even with the "alternative LI" they planned for her (*pukes*), they focused more on Madeleine's feelings than Hana's.

When the narrative should have allowed her the space to explore what her parents did wrong and arm her against their faulty arguments about her being the "delicate flower" who cannot survive without them, the writers opted to push her into a 'solution' that was still centered around her usefulness, not her emotional state. Her 'happy ending' with her parents involves constantly educating them on how to treat her with respect, a suffocating, draining process for a child with her background.

When the narrative should have - at least - given her a good wedding, after showing us what dreams she had for it, a wedding where she was treated like a bride, not a bridesmaid, her writers did exactly the opposite. She is more skilled than the MC yet it is the MC that gets the duchy. She is the creative one who comes up with the polo moves yet it is the MC that gets the credit. She is the one that didn't have a chance to fully plan her own wedding the way she wanted earlier, yet the same MC still treats her like her wedding planner rather than a bride. In not one of these situations is she ever allowed to vent about or even speak of what this is doing to her.

Maybe they will give her a chance to explore this difficult journey, maybe they won't. But how dare they push another tragic, difficult (to her) truth such as this, when they have barely allowed her to voice discontent or pain on a host of other issues!

Piling more pain on top of the pain a character already has, isn't going to make your character better developed. Allowing them the space to feel and show those feelings to others will. Thinking of worthy resolutions to those issues, will. If you want to be fair to Hana, center her in her story. Expand on her origins. Focus on story not skills. And validate her pain goddammit!!

• Sigh. Until next time, folks.

[mimik-u]

Flower Child (Chapter 3)

Title: Texts

Summary:

Garnet, Pearl, Amethyst, Greg, Yellow, and Blue—they've all lost someone. Lovers and daughters and friends and family, and that's not a wound you easily come back from.

If at all.

But this isn't an 'if at all' kind of story.

It's a story about a sickly, little kid named Steven and his ever-growing surrogate family.

It's a story about the kind of boy who'd extend a flower and a smile to a sad stranger he meets at a cemetery. Human AU.

AO3 Link

Sunday, 9:43 PM

Pearl: You’re really going to let him go see the Diamonds?

Pearl: After all they’ve done?

Pearl: After all WE’VE done to stand against them?

Greg: Its what he wants Pearl. who are we to deny him that?

Pearl: He didn’t want her to know about his condition.

Greg: That was different!

Pearl: Sure, Greg.

The three dots of impending doom jumped onto her screen within an instant, but Pearl didn’t wait for what was surely another half-assed justification from a man who seemed to half-ass anything that could be half-assed. (Which was neither fair nor right, but God, she was livid.) She shut her phone down, placed it on the nightstand, and rolled back onto her pillow with an aggressive thump.

Which, of course, did nothing to alleviate the headache that had been beating against the back of her skull all day.

Rose… Rose wouldn’t have wanted this, would she?

Her son fraternizing with the enemy.

With Yellow Diamond.

Even the mere thought of the woman was enough to conjure a clear image of the imposing CEO in Pearl’s mind-eye. She had golden eyes and a hard heart, and her practices—from her exploitation of workers to the conditions of her factories—were far from ethical. She was a tyrant, a monster, a despot.

And Steven was set to enter her lair.

(An extravagant penthouse suite that had reportedly cost over 200 million dollars.)

Her little boy, swallowed up by the yellow beast.

Rose… Rose wouldn’t have permitted this…

… Right?

Right?

It was a single instant of hesitation, but it was enough, and her mistrust and anger and irritation at Yellow, at Greg, at the world, soon gave away to another emotion, one that had been swelling up in Pearl’s chest all day. She rolled over to her side and plucked her phone up once more, clearing Greg’s response away with a furious swipe so she could type in her password.

It was 7673.

It was Rose. 

She clicked the little photo icon and scrolled.

Scrolled past pictures of Steven as he slept during one of his dialysis treatments.

Past twenty Amethyst selfies that had been taken while Pearl wasn’t looking.

Past the family’s vacation to a cabin in the vast, snowy mountains.

And then she abruptly stopped, tapping once to expand the only image she wanted to see.

It was a picture of a picture, of a polaroid Garnet had taken approximately a year before Rose had met Greg, and everything had gone to—

Rose’s arm was wrapped around Pearl’s shoulders, and her pink lips were pressed against her cheek, and they were laughing.

Laughing!

And Pearl was in love.

Even in the blurry polaroid, she could see the faint blush that had traced itself across the bridge of her pointed nose like a messy pink scribble, could see the admiration that had made her eyes shine so bright once upon a time.

And she could feel the phantoms of warmth.

The warmth of Rose’s big, encompassing arms.

The warmth that had spread across Pearl’s entire body, that had electrified her veins.

A hot, itchy sensation climbed and climbed her throat until it welled up in her eyes. The phone went slack in her hand, tumbling to the bed.

Who was she kidding?

She didn’t know what Rose would have wanted.

After all, once upon a time, Pearl had thought that she wanted her.

She would have turned forty today had she not chosen… She bit her lip. She didn’t want to admit it, not even to herself.

It did not compute.

She would have turned forty, she tried again. The tears dripped down her beaky nose. And she would have been radiant.

Monday, 7:02 AM

Garnet: safe drive steven. <3

Steven: Thanks, boo. <3

Steven: And just so you know… I did think about what you told me last night.

Steven: And, like, I really thank you for being upfront with me about how you felt. Pearl just straight up told me that I shouldn’t go, and you took the time to tell me why I shouldn’t go, but this is just something I have to do Garnet.

Garnet: have to?

Steven: I guess I don’t have to, but I want to.

Steven: She’s really nice, and she’s really sad, and I want to be her friend.

Around her, the gym’s locker room was coming to life. Fellow trainers changing into exercise gear for appointments with clients. Early gym comers heading off to the showers for a rinse off. People talking and sipping coffee and slamming locker doors with aplomb. But Garnet was immobile on the bench, her entire world contained in the little screen sitting in the palm of her hand.

She was conflicted, and conflicted wasn’t exactly a feeling she experienced very often.

It was unpleasant to say the least.

Like a fist nurtured into her stomach over and over and over again.

On one hand—one of the fists churning her stomach in nauseating ways—the memories and the rage and the rage those memories roared into existence tore through her overwhelmed head like fire in a forest. She saw Rose Quartz standing on a box in front of the D.E. building, the force and passion in her words inspiring disgruntled workers to join her in protest. Saw her own hands wrapped around a sign that screamed for FAIR WAGES as her hoarse voice did the same. Garnet’s own mothers, Ruby and Sapphire, had worked in one of D.E.’s factories overseas before they’d come to America.

They were the reasons she had taken up Rose’s banner in the first place.

Ruby’s calloused hands testified to cruel work—the kind of stuff that may have broken a lesser person—and Sapphire’s strained silence about those years spoke volumes where she could not.

Whenever they saw Yellow Diamond on TV, they would immediately blanch and grasp hands, as though they were afraid that she would reach through the screen and wrench them apart.

On the other hand—Garnet gritted her teeth to make this concession—Yellow Diamond was her demon. Hers and her parents’ and Rose’s and Amethyst’s and Pearl’s.

Not Steven’s.

She wanted him to inherit so many things from her—some wondrous and some wise.

Love and light and patience and perseverance.

But not hate.

Never hate.

Garnet threw her towel around her neck and stood up with a sigh that reached into her bones and shook them for good measure.

Garnet: okay… i love you steven. <3

Steven: I love you too Garnet. <3

Monday, 9:12 AM

Amethyst: 

Pearl: You’re not driving, correct?! If so, please put your phone down immediately! 

Pearl: If not, very cute.

Amethyst: chillllllllax P

Amethyst: ste-man is getting a snack from the gas station. we’re about an hr out from empire city

Garnet: :)

Pearl: Excellent timing, Amethyst!

Pearl: Remember, his appointment starts at 12, so that should give you plenty enough time to check into the hotel and get situated there.

Pearl: I’ve put the reservations under your name.

Pearl: You have the debit card, right?

Pearl: Oh, goodness. I think I forgot to pack M.C. Bear Bear.

Garnet: i handled it.

Amethyst: haha - nice save G

Garnet: B)

Garnet: i’m psychic

One of the double doors leading out from the gas station was pushed open with a lethargic kind of energy, and Amethyst, who had been leaning against the hood of her car, looked up from her phone to see that the wimpy gesture belonged to none other than her little buddy, her Steven. He closed the door carefully with his weak hand, nurturing a bag of Chaps in the other, and then, without so much as glancing her way, trudged right past her to the passenger side of the car, pulled the door open, and barreled in.

The door didn’t slam to a close so much as it did feebly stutter to one.

Well, that was a huge yikes.

Not waiting to give him time to stew in his feelings, Amethyst pocketed her phone and proceeded to the driver’s side, pulling her seatbelt across her chest and cranking the ignition to her little Honda Civic in one, fluid motion. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that Steven was looking at the bag of chips clenched in his hand, but there was something in his expression—something unfocused, something glazed—that told her that he wasn’t quite seeing what he was seeing.

She pulled out of the parking lot and tried to keep her voice as casual as possible. “You okay, little dude?”

He wasn’t. Obviously. But it didn’t hurt to ask.

She knew Steven well enough to know that he’d rather drown in the ocean ten times over rather than share his feelings.

But she also knew that once he started talking through them, like the ocean, they’d flow.

“Yeah… just got a little dizzy when I was standing in line for the register.” He laughed humorlessly, the bag in his hand crinkling in a way that told her that he’d squeezed it tightly. “But I guess that’s just a occupational hazard of this whole dying business.”

They were on the highway now, Jersey speeding past them in a blur of green and gray and black. Amethyst’s fingers choked the wheel.

“You’re not dying, Steven,” she gritted out, trying to see straight. The edges of her vision bursted with red, and all she wanted to do was pull over and slam the kid into a freaking hug. “Get that outta your head.”

“I know, I know.” He rested his elbow on the door’s control panel and leaned his head against the window. She couldn’t see his eyes, but their reflections were dark with trees. Perhaps they were just dark all over. “Just joking.”

Amethyst took one hand off the wheel and squeezed his free one. His skin was clammy and cold to touch.

“You’re not, but that was a good try, Ste-man.”

“What can I say?” He laughed again, and at least this one had a little more body to it. “I’m a virtuoso at using dark humor to cope with my crippling depression.”

And he meant it to be funny.

Meant it to be ironic.

But she wasn’t having it.

“You don’t have to be, though,” she told him, as serious as she could be. “Not with me anyway”

And he turned to look at her, his dark eyes widening in something that may have have just been awe.

She blushed furiously but blustered on anyway because dammit, this kid needed this talk, like, yesterday.

“I mean, I know you front with everyone else, but, like, you don’t have to do that when you’re around me, okay?” Amethyst’s grip tightened on his hand. “I get not wanting to talk about it. I get desperately needing to talk about it. I get you, Steven.”

Because they were alike, him and her.

They had issues, and they tried not to think about those issues and only ended up thinking about them all the more.

It was a cycle she knew well.

She wished Steven didn’t have to.

He didn’t answer immediately. Amethyst withdrew her hand and replaced it on the wheel, driving in silence for as long as the silence stretched thin between them.

She felt his gaze upon her.

Felt the intensity of it, the sadness.

“I just… I just feel so bad, Amethyst,” he whispered. “All the time.”

Amethyst wanted to melt into her seat. A lump rose to her throat.

“I know, buddy.”

“I’ve forgotten what it feels like to feel good.” His voice was fragile—not in the way glass was fragile, but in the way a dandelion was. One puff, and then it was gone.

“I know.”

She heard a sniffing sound.

A surreptitious swipe of the nose.

Amethyst knew better than to look his way.

Monday, 11:31 AM

Amethyst: heyyyy greg. steven and i made it to e city. bout to drive to the hospital.

Greg: Thanks for the update!

Amethyst: yah. np.

Greg: uh, what does that mean ??

Amethyst: no problem

Greg: i didn’t thank you for anything?? ?

Monday, 4:38 PM

Amethyst: sorry for not answering ur calls. just got back to the hotel. steven’s asleep. gonna have to text.

Greg: He’s asleep? already?

Pearl: What did Dr. Maheswaran say?

Amethyst: yeah poor kid’s worn out

Amethyst: she’s not happy w/ his blood count. she says his hemoglobin is low. if it doesn’t get better by the end of the week she might do a blood transfusion

Amethyst: 4 days of dialysis this week instead of 3

Amethyst: steven’s not happy :/

Pearl: That’s it. We’re coming up there immediately.

Amethyst: no!

Amethyst: i mean, not that i don’t want you guys to be here, but u guys can’t afford to take any more time off work

Amethyst: and we’ve got bills ’n stuff to pay

Amethyst: not 2 mention the new iron pill dr. m prescribed

Amethyst: like - i’ve got this

Pearl: Garnet? Greg? What do you think?

Garnet: amethyst is right.

Greg: i mean yeah… I’m not happy about it, but she’s got a point.

Pearl: Okay… but if things get worse, we’re coming up there. Alright?

Amethyst: k

She’d drawn the curtains to make it darker in the room, but even still, a crack of blue light slipped in through the gap, illuminating Steven’s sleeping form. He was curled up under the blankets, which obscured most of his face.

His little button nose poked out.

His closed eyes fluttered restlessly.

Amethyst wondered if he was dreaming.

And if he was, she hoped that it was a good one.

Because frankly, reality sucked.

While Steven had been changing from the hospital gown to his regular clothes, Dr. Maheswaran had pulled her aside and given her a haughty once over that let Amethyst know at once that the doctor wished she were Pearl, who, out of Steven’s four parental figures had the best grasp of all the medical jargon.

“He’s needs a new kidney, and he needs it soon,” Dr. Maheswaran said. No sugarcoating. No bull. She didn’t have the best bedside manners per say, but the nephrologist would tell it to you straight, and that was what mattered most to Amethyst.

“Then find him one, Doc.”

“I’m trying,” she frowned, and the lines under her brown eyes became all the more pronounced. “But kidneys are a tall, damn order.”

Monday, 4:48 PM:

Greg: love ya champ

Greg: i’m so proud of you

Monday, 5:01 PM:

Pearl: Call me when you get up! Love you, Steven. <3

Monday, 5:09 PM:

Garnet: <3

Tuesday, 10:32 AM:

Amethyst: picked up steven’s prescription

Amethyst: we’re @ breakfast

Pearl: How much was the copay?

Amethyst: only like $10

Pearl: :) I’ll add that to my ledger.

Amethyst: neeeeeeerdddd alert

Pearl: This ‘nerd’ does your taxes for you every year.

Amethyst: and i appreciate tht but that doesn’t make u any less of a nerd

“Gosh, I was hungry,” Steven said around a mouthful of waffles. He already had his next bite queued up on his fork, and a trace of syrup dripped down the corner of his mouth.

Amethyst was hella relieved to see that his appetite had returned; last night, he’d stayed passed out until 3AM, and when he woke up, she could only get him to nibble on a couple of crackers. 

“Bet,” she replied, chomping down hard on a piece of syrup covered bacon, savoring more than just its taste. The sweetness was good, but seeing Steven in a good mood made it even sweeter.

“Who were ya texting?”

“Pearl. She was being lame and trying to talk to me about math.”

Steven chuckled. “You should try being homeschooled by her.”

He squared his blocky shoulders and clasped his hands behind his back, two actions which resulted in an uncanny physical impression of their dear Pearl.

“Now Steven,” he mimicked in a high, lofty voice, “you can’t just move the x around like that. There’s a certain finesse to it. A technique. Here, let me do it.” He lowered his voice back to its normal pitch. “And then she starts talking about how my mom was great at solving division problems or something like that.”

Amethyst’s eyes were streaming. She banged her fists on the table, drawing a nasty look from a passing waitress.

“You’re a riot, Steven.”

“Thank ya!” He grinned.

When their meal came to a close—and it only did after they’d each slammed a couple of more waffles—Steven swirled the quarter of orange juice he had left in his glass, and Amethyst pulled out his ever-expanding pillbox from her bag.

Red pills.

Blue pills.

Iron pills.

Diuretics.

And by God, they were all big enough to be choking hazards.

“Ugh, Steven,” she muttered, her nose wrinkling in disgust. “I dunno how you do this everyday.”

“Oh, that’s an easy one,” he replied cheerfully, accepting her offering of his Tuesday pills. “I totally dissociate.”

“Solid, dude.”

Steven downed the pills one by one, chasing them with vigorous swills of juice.

“Tell me about it,” he gasped when he was done, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

They had another hour or so to kill before Steven had to return to the hospital for his treatment, so they took to walking down one of Empire City’s lesser known shopping districts. From time to time, they’d rest on a bench until Steven could catch his shortened breath.

It was during one of these breaks when the little bugger finally breached the topic of conversation she’d been crossing her fingers to avoid.

“If I don’t end up having to get a transfusion,” he began thoughtfully, head angled backwards so he could stare up at all the high rises poking into the sky, “I think I wanna text Blue Diamond soon. Visit her while I’m here, maybe.”

“Maybe…” She hesitated, and Steven was quick to snap up on it.

“Amethyst, I love you, but if you give me the same, old spiel on why I shouldn’t visit Blue, I’m gonna walk away.” She couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not. His voice was playful, but his eyes were grim, and his mouth was pressed into a thin, determined line.

“You’re sure bent on doing this, huh?”

“Very bent,” he agreed succinctly, nodding with dramatic precision before adding, “Super bent.”

Because there was obviously a discernible difference between super bent and very bent.

Amethyst scratched her neck and sighed.

“If the doc gives you the go ahead, then text her,” she told him grudgingly. “I wasn’t a part of the team when all the big protests against Yellow D were going on, so I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t go.”

Pearl and Garnet seemed to have plenty of reasons, though.

“Thanks, Amethyst!”

“No big deal, dude.”

Their little bench was an island in the stream—solitary, stable, even with so many people flooding around it. Amethyst did as Steven was doing and tilted her head back to drink in the panorama from above, appreciative of the cool breeze that slid across her face and stirred her long hair. Her eyes closed against the bright, golden sun.

“I was doing some research,” Steven said, and he was very quiet. Melancholy.

Amethyst opened one eye to look at him, but he wasn’t looking at her. His hands were clasped neatly on his lap, his solemn gaze still offered to the heavens.

“A couple of years back, there was an awful murder that took place outside of a bar somewhere in this city.” He paused. “The details were too… gruesome, I guess, for the article to talk about. She was only twenty-one.”

She raised a questioning eyebrow at him. “Dark stuff you’re reading there, kid.”

His shoulder rose and fell in a half-shrug.

“It was a dark thing that happened.”

Tuesday, 4:29 PM

Steven: Hey guys! Just got out of treatment.

Greg: how was it kiddo?

Steven: Better than yesterday. We’re heading to the hotel.

Pearl: I’m so glad, Steven!

Garnet: !!!

Steven: Thanks! Love you all.

Amethyst read the texts in the group chat while Steven was hung over the toilet, puking his little guts out.

Insistent that Amethyst stay out of the bathroom until he was done.

She rapped on the door anyway, unsure if he heard her over the sound of his own violent retching.

Dialysis naturally had the effect of making him nauseous, but nausea was also a side effect of the new iron pills he was taking, so really, the odds were just not in Steven’s favor today.

“You okay in there?”

“I feel like the answer to that question”—he paused to gag—“is very obvious.”

Asshole, she thought fondly and barged into the bathroom. Kid needed a Sprite, a cold rag to the forehead, and a nice, little trip to bed.

“Amethyst—“ He whined, lifting his head feebly from the commode. The traces of throw up were edged along the corner of his mouth.

“Shut up, Steven, and let me love you.”

She grabbed a washcloth from the counter and turned on the faucet, the loud hissing noise just not loud enough to mask what was surely another round of vomit.

Wednesday, 3:22 PM

Amethyst: STEEEEVEEENNNN’S GOT A GIRLFRIEND

Pearl: What?!?!

Garnet: nice.

Greg: way 2 go champ!

Amethyst: asgdshafl 

Amethyst: so dr. m’s daughter came in today to read to patients and like she and steven rlly hit it off

Amethyst: her name is Connie

Amethyst: and i’m calling it now. their ship name is stevonnie

Pearl: I think I’m experiencing premature empty nest syndrome. 

Amethyst: ya’ve got the nose for it

Pearl: Rude.

Amethyst: but anyway his treatment’s almost done and dr. m says his blood count’s looking better

Amethyst: no transfusion!

Pearl: Thank goodness. 

Greg: ugh I agree

Garnet: Woo.

Amethyst: and he’s happy today

Amethyst glanced up from her phone to confirm what she was telling the others.

“Buuuuuuut Connnnnnnie, you can’t just leave it on a cliffhanger!” Steven was pleading, fingers mussed through his dark, curly hair in exasperation. “Like, Lisa is literally hanging from a cliff. I need to know what happens!”

“Okay, okay!” The dark-skinned girl pushed her wire-rimmed glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “One more paragraph… Mom’s about to unhook you from the machine, though.”

Dr. Maheswaran waved her off with a dismissive flick of the hand. “One more paragraph would be fine.”

“Yes ma’am!” She re-buried her nose into the thick book. “Lisa’s hand was slick with sweat as Archimedes…”

Steven leaned forward expectantly, hand tucked under his chin, M.C. Bear Bear clutched tightly to his chest right next to his dialysis catheter and all of the tubing involved.

And he was smiling like a fool.

Like a kid.

Amethyst: he’s rlly happy

Wednesday, 7:41 PM

Steven: Hi Blue… this is Steven.

Steven: That cute kid from the cemetery. :)

Blue: Hello, Steven. It’s so very nice to hear from you. How are you?

Steven: Could be better. Could be worse. You?

Blue: Ah, likewise.

Steven: I was texting to say that I’ll be in Empire City for the better part of the week, and I was wondering if I could take you up on that offer of coming to visit, maybe?

Blue: Of course—I would love that.

Blue: When would be the best day for you?

Steven: Friday would be great if that’s ok with you. 

Blue: Friday would be perfect. 1:00? We could do tea and cakes.

Steven: Now that’s what I’m talking about!

Blue: Friday it is then. I can’t wait to see you again, Steven.

Steven: I can’t wait to see you too.

Blue set her phone down on the bathroom counter, and twenty sleeping pills slipped between her tall fingers and back into the bottle.

It’d been a bad day.

She wouldn’t have done it…

She hadn’t been going to…

She had just been thinking.

It had been a bad day, and then Steven had texted.

“Well, I’m home for the night.” Startled, Blue looked up in the mirror to see her wife leaning in the doorframe—arms crossed, a permanent frown carved into her striking face. “Stocks are down, and my investors are running for the hills. It’s a hellhole. I’m in literal hell.”

Yellow detached herself from the door and drew closer. The tips of their fingers brushed ever so slightly, ever so softly.

And that was about as physically affectionate as they got nowadays.

“How was your day?” Her voice sharpened at the end. “I see you’re still in your nightgown.”

“It was fine, Yellow.” It absolutely was not.

Blue gripped the edge of the sink to keep her hands from shaking, determined not to glance at the pill bottle she’d been holding just moments before.

“Are you sure? I could call the doctor right now. Check the dosage on your antidepressant, perhaps?”

“Oh, yes,” she muttered venomously, more to herself than Yellow, but she supposed she didn’t care enough if Yellow heard it, too, “because that’s exactly what I need. An upped dosage.”

That seemed to be Yellow’s only reliable solution when it came to fixing her.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” Blue bit out. “Nothing at all.”

And she pushed off from the sink, impelled by dull anger, her shoulder roughly knocking against Yellow’s as she went.

Her hand slammed against the light switch before she exited the doorway, and it did her a great deal of good to submerge Yellow Diamond into total darkness.

[easyfoodnetwork]

White Open Spaces

For my immigrant family, outdoor recreation was not part of our usual vacation plans. Could learning to camp be the pandemic escape I needed?

Wei Tchou is a Brooklyn-based writer and former non-camper working on a book about her family and the cultural history of ferns.

“I know you can do it,” said Salem, smiling at me with encouraging eyes, even though I didn’t know the first thing about building a campfire. It was meant to be a gesture of sweetness that he wanted me to build a hearth for his younger siblings on our first campout together. But I couldn’t read it as anything but an act of inscrutable emotional terrorism, doled out to a devoted girlfriend whose only crime was being accomodating enough to come on this stupid camping trip in the first place. I covered my face with my hands to hide my tears.

A part of me had hoped I would take to camping as if the woods were my true home all along. Like a captive platypus released back into her highland waterways, my real self would shake off such earthly superficialities as shelter, safety, and lumbar support as I became just another creature of nature, flowers weaving through my hair as sparrows sang overhead. Instead, my first experience of camping found me crying next to a gaping pit of ashes in front of my boyfriend’s family.

My first experience of camping found me crying next to a gaping pit of ashes in front of my boyfriend’s family.

I thought of my Chinese immigrant parents, who would likely shudder at the thought of me sleeping on a dirt floor and getting my vagina so close to the ground while peeing that something might plausibly climb in. My parents did not immigrate to this country for me to have something crawl into my vagina! I thought.

How could I have ever been so delusional as to think that I would tolerate, much less enjoy, a life in the woods, when very little in my 32 years of life has indicated an ease with anything less than the cool breeze of an air-conditioning unit, four bars of LTE, and good Chinese takeout just around the corner?

Minimalist camping, as it turns out, requires a surprising amount of stuff.

The answer to this question is most likely the same as yours “in these unprecedented times,” or ITUT, as a friend of mine likes to refer to the narrowing of life since COVID-19 spread to our coast. I was sick of being cooped up in the city but anxious about making the pandemic worse by contracting it, spreading it, or putting service workers at greater risk with my selfish longing for a cappuccino.

And also, I recently finished a partial manuscript of my book, which is in part a personal history of my interest in ferns. It’s hard not to spend, say, four years of one’s adult life writing about the wonders of ferns and nature without feeling like an abject phony for being suspicious about any immersion in wilderness beyond just, like, looking at it from the car.

So, when Salem’s younger sister, Pearl, and younger brother, Hazel, who are both outdoors enthusiasts, proposed that we all go camping together up in Maine last month, I felt uncharacteristically enthusiastic. Camping! A way to safely spend time with loved ones somewhere other than Zoom. Camping! A way to prove t,hat I could be as much of an expert on ferns as some unkempt white dude in Chacos. If I could learn to camp, it seemed to me, then maybe I could also be free.

Julia Cameron, the author of the cult ’70s-era workbook for creatives The Artist’s Way, would call this confluence of desires with opportunity a synchronicity, which is just a woo-woo term for coincidences that fall in your favor, she asserts, when you thoroughly believe in your art. Back in March, I roped Salem, who was quarantining with me in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and his sister, Pearl, who lives in Maine, into tackling the self-help classic, whose “spiritual path to higher creativity” winds through a tidy 12 weeks — enough time, I reasoned, that the lockdown would be over well before we finished. It was a welcome distraction from the aching distress of watching the daily death toll tick up and washing our hands until they were raw. Our group expanded to include Salem and Pearl’s mother, Betsy (who actually is an artist), Pearl’s partner, Alec (who is an artist, but for ice cream), Pearl’s best friend, Peyton (who works on behalf of environmental justice), and finally Hazel, after he graduated from college over Zoom.

Talk to my family about spending a stretch of time in the woods and they’ll assume you were exiled for doing something very bad, like owning land or refusing to become a doctor.

It alarmed me at first that I was an outsider in my own self-help group — the new girlfriend in a weekly video chat of Salem’s family and friends, and, just as acutely, the only nonwhite person. But I grew close to them as we completed tasks that encouraged our childlike sense of wonder: wandering outside to gather leaves and flowers, collaging our dream lives. One writing exercise asked us to name activities that we wished, as children, we’d had the freedom to try. I found myself absentmindedly listing mountain biking, rock climbing, hiking, and, surprisingly, camping.

What the fuck, I thought, immediately troubled by what appeared to be a repressed desire to become woodsy. In my mind, woodsiness conjured images of beautiful, sunned white people looking inexplicably chic in technical gear and tangled hair, unbothered by the elements — the kind of person whose insouciant athleticism and confidence in using the terms “suffering” and “challenging” interchangeably did not belie a childhood of Suzuki method and Saturday school and the lifelong condition that every decision you make must justify the sacrifices your family made for you to simply be alive.

In my predominantly white Appalachian hometown, I had felt alienated by how casual and insistent people were about outdoor recreation. (Talk to my family about spending a stretch of time in the woods and they’ll assume you were exiled for doing something very bad, like owning land or refusing to become a doctor.) Unlike turning the radio on to learn pop songs or begging your mother to buy you a pair of sweatpants with “JUICY” written on the butt, learning to camp was impossible without someone to show you how. And the only people who might show me how were the same assholes who rejected me, even if I could sing along to every ’N Sync song, unconvincingly shaking my hips in baby-pink terry cloth. Along with how I looked, it was just another obvious way of understanding that no matter what I tried to become, I would never really belong.

Setting up the tent was less puzzle-like than I’d thought.

From left to right: Pearl, PJ the dog, Hazel, and Salem

After I moved to New York City, I was proud to be able to finally reject woodsiness entirely. Here, I found belonging with people who, like me, found “camping people” to be perplexing and objectionable. I left behind the fear of being patronized for simply wanting to sleep in a bed with central air blowing on my face for the rest of my life. It was devastating to have to admit to myself, and then to my Artist’s Way group, that I had always secretly dreamed of seeing myself out there in the wilderness — tending a fire and drinking a tin cup of coffee in the foggy, crisp morning — strong enough to shoulder a pack over rough, pastoral terrain.

Call it another synchronicity that after Salem and I met on Tinder (an app that literally runs on synchronicities), we discovered that we were from two towns hugging opposite sides of the same Appalachian mountain range. Yet Salem had grown up camping, even if he had later diverged from his woodsy siblings, fleeing the mountains for the city. As we drove north for our camping adventure, I contemplated the cruel joke that now, as an adult, I was off to assimilate to the white hobby I’d rejected with fierce vehemence all of my life, with my white boyfriend and his white family who were from the same white part of the country I’d spent my entire life attempting to escape.

Our lakeside campsite was beautiful, if car-accessible.

Any self-worth I’d managed to cling to evaporated as soon as Salem, Pearl, Hazel, and I — in preparation for our trip — walked into a camping store, whose floor was marked all over in blue tape to indicate where customers might stand to stay six feet apart. In part, my insecurity had to do with the fact that I’d poisoned myself the day before eating dried apricots, forgetting that apricots are a stone fruit, which I am allergic to. (Another synchronicity?) But really it was my intimidation about entering a store that said it was for camping, yet seemed only to sell racks and racks of long metal thingies and neon fabric bags attached to larger neon fabric bags. All the products were puzzles to solve, rather than recognizable pieces of equipment — a tent, for instance, that I might look at and think, Wow, that’s a great tent! My reluctance to touch things in stores since the pandemic began only made the process worse. Like, I knew I needed to buy a sleeping bag but felt stupid trying to choose one by staring as hard as I could at various lumpy sacks of nylon.

If the allure of camping evokes a certain rugged minimalism, the reality is strikingly fussy.

Sensing my panic, Pearl asked if I’d like to go take a look at tin cups in the cooking section, and I was relieved. I know food, I know cooking, I thought, puffing out my chest as we walked. But to my bewilderment, anything I might recognize in a kitchen was again abstracted to pieces of plastic, or sinister-looking canisters of gas and gadgets that promised to boil water in under 30 seconds (but, why!).

“Wei, look,” Pearl said, as I stared into the abyss of a collapsible plastic bowl. Grinning, she presented me with an enamel tin cup printed with a graphic of a lantern, and I sighed in recognition as she placed it in my hands. For drinking coffee out of! So sturdy! So cute! I thought. It was $20 and I threw it greedily into my basket — had it been $200, I still would have wanted it, for its familiarity, for its having the decency of looking like exactly what it was.

Shopping for camping supplies was triggering — and expensive.

If the allure of camping evokes a certain rugged minimalism, the reality is strikingly fussy. You need a lot of stuff; the stuff is very expensive, and without experience, it’s hard to figure out what kind of stuff you’re even going to need. And none of it is going to make you feel woodsy, really — mostly it will just make you feel broke, staring at a two-foot-long receipt, registering that you’ve blown $650 in less than half an hour on the bare minimum of supplies.

It can make you furious to think about, especially during a pandemic when there are few options to escape the city, and the one that seems easy and cheap and safe turns out to be so psychologically and financially demanding that I, for one, would have given up upon entry at the store if I wouldn’t have felt even worse to let Salem and his siblings down.

I was still fuming about all of this when Salem suggested we camp out in Pearl’s backyard to test out our new equipment. Though I was feeling defeated, I followed along as he pulled out tent rods and began assembling them over a plastic tarp. I found that assembly was surprisingly intuitive — not puzzle-like at all — and before long, we were straightening out another piece of tarp over a modular mesh structure. We took turns staking its corners into the dirt, and in spite of myself, I couldn’t help but feel proud, admiring the neat little orange tent before us.

That night, I fell asleep in my new sleeping bag listening to rain drum the fabric over my head. All of my frustrations unexpectedly melted into a sweet, peaceful feeling that this small space, with its sounds and its funny mesh pockets and zippers, was mine. I was suddenly a child overcome by wonder, the anxieties and paranoia of the past few months dissipating as I observed little spiders scurrying in from the rain under the fly. They parachuted around on their silks as Salem snored softly, far away already in a distant dream.

Dinner was a delicious hodgepodge.

Our campsite was situated on a farm nestling an ocean bay — salt breezes rolled through the open windows of our car as we puttered along a long path of RVs, campers, and tents. The first thing I noticed was that very few people were wearing masks — we’d all been required to prove we’d been tested for COVID-19 before we booked. I marveled at the fact that it was the first time in almost half a year that it seemed okay to observe the noses and mouths of so many strangers, going about their days uninterrupted by obsessive ritual sanitization of their bodies and possessions.

The next thing I noticed was that I didn’t have to carry anything more than a few feet from car to campsite, which, by the way, presided over a spectacular waterfront view, no walking necessary. It turns out there are degrees of camping, folks — a fact I was a little mad to find out. There was even an organic ice cream stand on the premises (which did, for the record, observe social-distancing protocols) where Pearl, Hazel, and I would circle back later to share a cup of s’mores-flavored ice cream, studded generously with marshmallow fluff and graham cracker crumbles.

Have camping people selfishly stoked the conspiracy that you have to strap on 50 pounds of gear and scale K2 every time you go camping to keep non-campers from their delicious ice cream stands? I contemplated this as we drew closer to our site, but my attention was drawn toward several figures playing on a swing set.

“Asians,” I whispered urgently, pointing them out through my window.

One privilege of being a journalist is the shamelessness with which I feel I can approach strangers, and Asian strangers in particular, to ask about their experiences, because, well, it’s my job. After we set up our tents, Hazel humored me by coming along as I stalked across the field toward several preteens at the campsite’s playground.

“I’m going to wait over here,” Hazel told me, stopping tentatively by the swing set, as I approached two of the older kids, introduced myself as a writer, and asked if I could chat with them.

I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of pride and relief in registering that the most beautiful campsite of all was made by the only nonwhite people I’d seen.

“So, like, I’ve only seen white people out here,” I told them, trying to make my eyes smiley rather than threatening above my mask. They giggled and looked at each other. “Are you guys from around here?” I asked.

“We’re from Brooklyn,” they said, and I laughed, because of course they were. They told me that they normally vacationed in Japan this time of year, to visit family, but given the pandemic they had to stay in the States. Camping was popular in Japan, too, they said, pointing in the direction of their campsite, which featured an impossibly chic yurt flanked by a large shade sail. I knew just by glancing at their complicated-looking pour-over device that they were drinking excellent coffee.

I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of pride and relief in registering that the most beautiful campsite of all was made by the only nonwhite people I’d seen, and Asian Americans to boot. By then, Hazel was making his way up to me, and I waved at him gleefully as I introduced him to the kids.

“Our parents are Asian, too!” one of them told us cheerfully.

“We’re Asian, dummy,” the other responded, rolling his eyes. “So obviously that means our parents are Asian, too.”

“I mean, not necessarily,” I said, trying to be helpful. “You could be adopted!”

“Yeah, we could be adopted,” the other said, blowing a raspberry at his friend. Hazel and I grinned conspiratorially as we hurried back to fill Pearl in on what we learned about the Asians, taking turns recounting the details.

I’ve never built a campfire in my life.

Later, we all drank sake out of our tin cups as we watched the sun set pink over the bay at low tide — clam diggers worked their way through the glistening mud as the siblings told me stories about growing up together, their disastrous road trips, the pets they had loved. As dusk settled, we hurried back to make dinner, at which point my pleasant, dreamy mood was shattered as Salem heartlessly attempted to press me into building that fire — the one on which our comfort and dinner depended.

“Oh no, oh my god! Wei! You’re getting so upset!” he said, as soon as I hid my face with my hands. He pulled me into a hug.

“Wei,” Pearl said gently from the fire pit, using the same tone she had at the camping store to coax me out of my manic state, and I wiped my face on my sleeves and crept down next to her as she explained how to start with pine needles, leaning larger and larger sticks over the fire as it grew. “People like to say there’s a right way to do it, but there isn’t,” she said, swatting Hazel away as he tried to offer commentary. She leaned in to blow on the fire, and the embers lit up with her breath.

Soon the fire was crackling and the siblings jumped into cooking, enthusiastically clashing about what they wanted to eat and how best to make it. Hazel established himself as the gourmand, dressing a steak with rosemary and butter and showing me how to gauge its doneness by pressing on different parts of my fist. Pearl roasted a hot dog on a stick while Salem fussed over an aluminum packet of potatoes and mushrooms. As they cooked, they debated new ways to construct a s’more — wrapping the entire thing in foil to place on the grate, dumping the chocolate and marshmallow in a pan to approximate something like s’more fondue.

At that moment, there was no better hot dog in the entire world than the one dripping with butter and ashes in my hands.

Listening to the siblings bicker and tease each other about their different ways of cooking, eating, and being, I was encouraged to find my own way, too, to see my camping ignorance as an opportunity to do exactly as I felt. (I’d even discovered, by then, that, just a little hike away, there was a cabin of gloriously pristine bathroom stalls, for those of us with overactive vaginal imaginations.)

I ventured to throw a hot dog and a bun on the grate. When they were both black with char, Hazel doused them in butter for me. I hate it when people say that food tastes better when you’re camping, as if there is glory in deprivation, but at that moment, there was no better hot dog in the entire world than the one dripping with butter and ashes in my hands.

Without a doubt, the best hot dog I’ve ever eaten

Maybe I’m a camping person after all.

The next day, Salem and I decided that we would camp one more night on our way home to Brooklyn. We stopped midway to have lunch with some friends, who graciously took our elaborate order, in advance, for what I like to call salad sandwiches — tomato, cucumber, sprouts, onion, avocado, cheddar, dill pickle, and mayonnaise on seven-grain bread. After picnicking and horsing around in a river all afternoon, the thought of setting up a tent again started to feel arduous.

“We could just drive straight home to Brooklyn,” Salem suggested, as I merged onto the freeway. I told him no — I was a camping person now, and that meant I needed to camp. Who even was I anymore, without the sun on my face and a patch of grass to curl up on?

We often talk about assimilation as if it were a one-way street, but it isn’t. It shouldn’t be.

We grew quiet, and I reflected on our past few days, on his family, on him. I thought back to earlier in the year, during some big fight, when I’d shouted at him to stop treating me like I was white, fed up with what I felt was his disinterest in my individual experience, while simultaneously seeing that I hadn’t exactly shared the reality of that experience freely, for fear that he would reject me like the camping people of my youth.

Until that fight, I had too often conflated belonging with acceptance. I thought that in order to be accepted, I needed to keep my nonwhite perspective from my white boyfriend and his white family. That I needed to face the wilderness unafraid to be taken seriously as a nature writer. That I needed to camp like “camping people” — like white people — in order to camp at all. But I grow more certain each day that my fixation with belonging only ever backfires. If I’m not honest about who I am, how can anyone figure out how to accept me in the first place?

Salem listened when I fussed at him about not being white, and I got a little braver every day about expressing the ways that I am different from him rather than the same. And now, a year into dating, his brother tags along when I feel moved to approach strangers at swing sets just because they are Asian, even if it makes him nervous. And his sister has identified how to tell when I’m so embarrassed I want to die, as well as the exact tone of voice that will calm me down. We often talk about assimilation as if it were a one-way street, but it isn’t. It shouldn’t be.

I glanced at Salem as he stared into his phone and struggled to remember what I thought of him when we first met. Now, when I look at his face I feel the collapse of distance, the familiarity of a kind of home that you can’t buy, or drive to, or set up with tent poles.

“Hey,” I said. He looked at me. “You were right. Let’s go back to Brooklyn.”

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3g9eaKo https://ift.tt/3g9Uypl

For my immigrant family, outdoor recreation was not part of our usual vacation plans. Could learning to camp be the pandemic escape I needed?

Wei Tchou is a Brooklyn-based writer and former non-camper working on a book about her family and the cultural history of ferns.

“I know you can do it,” said Salem, smiling at me with encouraging eyes, even though I didn’t know the first thing about building a campfire. It was meant to be a gesture of sweetness that he wanted me to build a hearth for his younger siblings on our first campout together. But I couldn’t read it as anything but an act of inscrutable emotional terrorism, doled out to a devoted girlfriend whose only crime was being accomodating enough to come on this stupid camping trip in the first place. I covered my face with my hands to hide my tears.

A part of me had hoped I would take to camping as if the woods were my true home all along. Like a captive platypus released back into her highland waterways, my real self would shake off such earthly superficialities as shelter, safety, and lumbar support as I became just another creature of nature, flowers weaving through my hair as sparrows sang overhead. Instead, my first experience of camping found me crying next to a gaping pit of ashes in front of my boyfriend’s family.

My first experience of camping found me crying next to a gaping pit of ashes in front of my boyfriend’s family.

I thought of my Chinese immigrant parents, who would likely shudder at the thought of me sleeping on a dirt floor and getting my vagina so close to the ground while peeing that something might plausibly climb in. My parents did not immigrate to this country for me to have something crawl into my vagina! I thought.

How could I have ever been so delusional as to think that I would tolerate, much less enjoy, a life in the woods, when very little in my 32 years of life has indicated an ease with anything less than the cool breeze of an air-conditioning unit, four bars of LTE, and good Chinese takeout just around the corner?

Minimalist camping, as it turns out, requires a surprising amount of stuff.

The answer to this question is most likely the same as yours “in these unprecedented times,” or ITUT, as a friend of mine likes to refer to the narrowing of life since COVID-19 spread to our coast. I was sick of being cooped up in the city but anxious about making the pandemic worse by contracting it, spreading it, or putting service workers at greater risk with my selfish longing for a cappuccino.

And also, I recently finished a partial manuscript of my book, which is in part a personal history of my interest in ferns. It’s hard not to spend, say, four years of one’s adult life writing about the wonders of ferns and nature without feeling like an abject phony for being suspicious about any immersion in wilderness beyond just, like, looking at it from the car.

So, when Salem’s younger sister, Pearl, and younger brother, Hazel, who are both outdoors enthusiasts, proposed that we all go camping together up in Maine last month, I felt uncharacteristically enthusiastic. Camping! A way to safely spend time with loved ones somewhere other than Zoom. Camping! A way to prove t,hat I could be as much of an expert on ferns as some unkempt white dude in Chacos. If I could learn to camp, it seemed to me, then maybe I could also be free.

Julia Cameron, the author of the cult ’70s-era workbook for creatives The Artist’s Way, would call this confluence of desires with opportunity a synchronicity, which is just a woo-woo term for coincidences that fall in your favor, she asserts, when you thoroughly believe in your art. Back in March, I roped Salem, who was quarantining with me in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and his sister, Pearl, who lives in Maine, into tackling the self-help classic, whose “spiritual path to higher creativity” winds through a tidy 12 weeks — enough time, I reasoned, that the lockdown would be over well before we finished. It was a welcome distraction from the aching distress of watching the daily death toll tick up and washing our hands until they were raw. Our group expanded to include Salem and Pearl’s mother, Betsy (who actually is an artist), Pearl’s partner, Alec (who is an artist, but for ice cream), Pearl’s best friend, Peyton (who works on behalf of environmental justice), and finally Hazel, after he graduated from college over Zoom.

Talk to my family about spending a stretch of time in the woods and they’ll assume you were exiled for doing something very bad, like owning land or refusing to become a doctor.

It alarmed me at first that I was an outsider in my own self-help group — the new girlfriend in a weekly video chat of Salem’s family and friends, and, just as acutely, the only nonwhite person. But I grew close to them as we completed tasks that encouraged our childlike sense of wonder: wandering outside to gather leaves and flowers, collaging our dream lives. One writing exercise asked us to name activities that we wished, as children, we’d had the freedom to try. I found myself absentmindedly listing mountain biking, rock climbing, hiking, and, surprisingly, camping.

What the fuck, I thought, immediately troubled by what appeared to be a repressed desire to become woodsy. In my mind, woodsiness conjured images of beautiful, sunned white people looking inexplicably chic in technical gear and tangled hair, unbothered by the elements — the kind of person whose insouciant athleticism and confidence in using the terms “suffering” and “challenging” interchangeably did not belie a childhood of Suzuki method and Saturday school and the lifelong condition that every decision you make must justify the sacrifices your family made for you to simply be alive.

In my predominantly white Appalachian hometown, I had felt alienated by how casual and insistent people were about outdoor recreation. (Talk to my family about spending a stretch of time in the woods and they’ll assume you were exiled for doing something very bad, like owning land or refusing to become a doctor.) Unlike turning the radio on to learn pop songs or begging your mother to buy you a pair of sweatpants with “JUICY” written on the butt, learning to camp was impossible without someone to show you how. And the only people who might show me how were the same assholes who rejected me, even if I could sing along to every ’N Sync song, unconvincingly shaking my hips in baby-pink terry cloth. Along with how I looked, it was just another obvious way of understanding that no matter what I tried to become, I would never really belong.

Setting up the tent was less puzzle-like than I’d thought.

From left to right: Pearl, PJ the dog, Hazel, and Salem

After I moved to New York City, I was proud to be able to finally reject woodsiness entirely. Here, I found belonging with people who, like me, found “camping people” to be perplexing and objectionable. I left behind the fear of being patronized for simply wanting to sleep in a bed with central air blowing on my face for the rest of my life. It was devastating to have to admit to myself, and then to my Artist’s Way group, that I had always secretly dreamed of seeing myself out there in the wilderness — tending a fire and drinking a tin cup of coffee in the foggy, crisp morning — strong enough to shoulder a pack over rough, pastoral terrain.

Call it another synchronicity that after Salem and I met on Tinder (an app that literally runs on synchronicities), we discovered that we were from two towns hugging opposite sides of the same Appalachian mountain range. Yet Salem had grown up camping, even if he had later diverged from his woodsy siblings, fleeing the mountains for the city. As we drove north for our camping adventure, I contemplated the cruel joke that now, as an adult, I was off to assimilate to the white hobby I’d rejected with fierce vehemence all of my life, with my white boyfriend and his white family who were from the same white part of the country I’d spent my entire life attempting to escape.

Our lakeside campsite was beautiful, if car-accessible.

Any self-worth I’d managed to cling to evaporated as soon as Salem, Pearl, Hazel, and I — in preparation for our trip — walked into a camping store, whose floor was marked all over in blue tape to indicate where customers might stand to stay six feet apart. In part, my insecurity had to do with the fact that I’d poisoned myself the day before eating dried apricots, forgetting that apricots are a stone fruit, which I am allergic to. (Another synchronicity?) But really it was my intimidation about entering a store that said it was for camping, yet seemed only to sell racks and racks of long metal thingies and neon fabric bags attached to larger neon fabric bags. All the products were puzzles to solve, rather than recognizable pieces of equipment — a tent, for instance, that I might look at and think, Wow, that’s a great tent! My reluctance to touch things in stores since the pandemic began only made the process worse. Like, I knew I needed to buy a sleeping bag but felt stupid trying to choose one by staring as hard as I could at various lumpy sacks of nylon.

If the allure of camping evokes a certain rugged minimalism, the reality is strikingly fussy.

Sensing my panic, Pearl asked if I’d like to go take a look at tin cups in the cooking section, and I was relieved. I know food, I know cooking, I thought, puffing out my chest as we walked. But to my bewilderment, anything I might recognize in a kitchen was again abstracted to pieces of plastic, or sinister-looking canisters of gas and gadgets that promised to boil water in under 30 seconds (but, why!).

“Wei, look,” Pearl said, as I stared into the abyss of a collapsible plastic bowl. Grinning, she presented me with an enamel tin cup printed with a graphic of a lantern, and I sighed in recognition as she placed it in my hands. For drinking coffee out of! So sturdy! So cute! I thought. It was $20 and I threw it greedily into my basket — had it been $200, I still would have wanted it, for its familiarity, for its having the decency of looking like exactly what it was.

Shopping for camping supplies was triggering — and expensive.

If the allure of camping evokes a certain rugged minimalism, the reality is strikingly fussy. You need a lot of stuff; the stuff is very expensive, and without experience, it’s hard to figure out what kind of stuff you’re even going to need. And none of it is going to make you feel woodsy, really — mostly it will just make you feel broke, staring at a two-foot-long receipt, registering that you’ve blown $650 in less than half an hour on the bare minimum of supplies.

It can make you furious to think about, especially during a pandemic when there are few options to escape the city, and the one that seems easy and cheap and safe turns out to be so psychologically and financially demanding that I, for one, would have given up upon entry at the store if I wouldn’t have felt even worse to let Salem and his siblings down.

I was still fuming about all of this when Salem suggested we camp out in Pearl’s backyard to test out our new equipment. Though I was feeling defeated, I followed along as he pulled out tent rods and began assembling them over a plastic tarp. I found that assembly was surprisingly intuitive — not puzzle-like at all — and before long, we were straightening out another piece of tarp over a modular mesh structure. We took turns staking its corners into the dirt, and in spite of myself, I couldn’t help but feel proud, admiring the neat little orange tent before us.

That night, I fell asleep in my new sleeping bag listening to rain drum the fabric over my head. All of my frustrations unexpectedly melted into a sweet, peaceful feeling that this small space, with its sounds and its funny mesh pockets and zippers, was mine. I was suddenly a child overcome by wonder, the anxieties and paranoia of the past few months dissipating as I observed little spiders scurrying in from the rain under the fly. They parachuted around on their silks as Salem snored softly, far away already in a distant dream.

Dinner was a delicious hodgepodge.

Our campsite was situated on a farm nestling an ocean bay — salt breezes rolled through the open windows of our car as we puttered along a long path of RVs, campers, and tents. The first thing I noticed was that very few people were wearing masks — we’d all been required to prove we’d been tested for COVID-19 before we booked. I marveled at the fact that it was the first time in almost half a year that it seemed okay to observe the noses and mouths of so many strangers, going about their days uninterrupted by obsessive ritual sanitization of their bodies and possessions.

The next thing I noticed was that I didn’t have to carry anything more than a few feet from car to campsite, which, by the way, presided over a spectacular waterfront view, no walking necessary. It turns out there are degrees of camping, folks — a fact I was a little mad to find out. There was even an organic ice cream stand on the premises (which did, for the record, observe social-distancing protocols) where Pearl, Hazel, and I would circle back later to share a cup of s’mores-flavored ice cream, studded generously with marshmallow fluff and graham cracker crumbles.

Have camping people selfishly stoked the conspiracy that you have to strap on 50 pounds of gear and scale K2 every time you go camping to keep non-campers from their delicious ice cream stands? I contemplated this as we drew closer to our site, but my attention was drawn toward several figures playing on a swing set.

“Asians,” I whispered urgently, pointing them out through my window.

One privilege of being a journalist is the shamelessness with which I feel I can approach strangers, and Asian strangers in particular, to ask about their experiences, because, well, it’s my job. After we set up our tents, Hazel humored me by coming along as I stalked across the field toward several preteens at the campsite’s playground.

“I’m going to wait over here,” Hazel told me, stopping tentatively by the swing set, as I approached two of the older kids, introduced myself as a writer, and asked if I could chat with them.

I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of pride and relief in registering that the most beautiful campsite of all was made by the only nonwhite people I’d seen.

“So, like, I’ve only seen white people out here,” I told them, trying to make my eyes smiley rather than threatening above my mask. They giggled and looked at each other. “Are you guys from around here?” I asked.

“We’re from Brooklyn,” they said, and I laughed, because of course they were. They told me that they normally vacationed in Japan this time of year, to visit family, but given the pandemic they had to stay in the States. Camping was popular in Japan, too, they said, pointing in the direction of their campsite, which featured an impossibly chic yurt flanked by a large shade sail. I knew just by glancing at their complicated-looking pour-over device that they were drinking excellent coffee.

I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of pride and relief in registering that the most beautiful campsite of all was made by the only nonwhite people I’d seen, and Asian Americans to boot. By then, Hazel was making his way up to me, and I waved at him gleefully as I introduced him to the kids.

“Our parents are Asian, too!” one of them told us cheerfully.

“We’re Asian, dummy,” the other responded, rolling his eyes. “So obviously that means our parents are Asian, too.”

“I mean, not necessarily,” I said, trying to be helpful. “You could be adopted!”

“Yeah, we could be adopted,” the other said, blowing a raspberry at his friend. Hazel and I grinned conspiratorially as we hurried back to fill Pearl in on what we learned about the Asians, taking turns recounting the details.

I’ve never built a campfire in my life.

Later, we all drank sake out of our tin cups as we watched the sun set pink over the bay at low tide — clam diggers worked their way through the glistening mud as the siblings told me stories about growing up together, their disastrous road trips, the pets they had loved. As dusk settled, we hurried back to make dinner, at which point my pleasant, dreamy mood was shattered as Salem heartlessly attempted to press me into building that fire — the one on which our comfort and dinner depended.

“Oh no, oh my god! Wei! You’re getting so upset!” he said, as soon as I hid my face with my hands. He pulled me into a hug.

“Wei,” Pearl said gently from the fire pit, using the same tone she had at the camping store to coax me out of my manic state, and I wiped my face on my sleeves and crept down next to her as she explained how to start with pine needles, leaning larger and larger sticks over the fire as it grew. “People like to say there’s a right way to do it, but there isn’t,” she said, swatting Hazel away as he tried to offer commentary. She leaned in to blow on the fire, and the embers lit up with her breath.

Soon the fire was crackling and the siblings jumped into cooking, enthusiastically clashing about what they wanted to eat and how best to make it. Hazel established himself as the gourmand, dressing a steak with rosemary and butter and showing me how to gauge its doneness by pressing on different parts of my fist. Pearl roasted a hot dog on a stick while Salem fussed over an aluminum packet of potatoes and mushrooms. As they cooked, they debated new ways to construct a s’more — wrapping the entire thing in foil to place on the grate, dumping the chocolate and marshmallow in a pan to approximate something like s’more fondue.

At that moment, there was no better hot dog in the entire world than the one dripping with butter and ashes in my hands.

Listening to the siblings bicker and tease each other about their different ways of cooking, eating, and being, I was encouraged to find my own way, too, to see my camping ignorance as an opportunity to do exactly as I felt. (I’d even discovered, by then, that, just a little hike away, there was a cabin of gloriously pristine bathroom stalls, for those of us with overactive vaginal imaginations.)

I ventured to throw a hot dog and a bun on the grate. When they were both black with char, Hazel doused them in butter for me. I hate it when people say that food tastes better when you’re camping, as if there is glory in deprivation, but at that moment, there was no better hot dog in the entire world than the one dripping with butter and ashes in my hands.

Without a doubt, the best hot dog I’ve ever eaten

Maybe I’m a camping person after all.

The next day, Salem and I decided that we would camp one more night on our way home to Brooklyn. We stopped midway to have lunch with some friends, who graciously took our elaborate order, in advance, for what I like to call salad sandwiches — tomato, cucumber, sprouts, onion, avocado, cheddar, dill pickle, and mayonnaise on seven-grain bread. After picnicking and horsing around in a river all afternoon, the thought of setting up a tent again started to feel arduous.

“We could just drive straight home to Brooklyn,” Salem suggested, as I merged onto the freeway. I told him no — I was a camping person now, and that meant I needed to camp. Who even was I anymore, without the sun on my face and a patch of grass to curl up on?

We often talk about assimilation as if it were a one-way street, but it isn’t. It shouldn’t be.

We grew quiet, and I reflected on our past few days, on his family, on him. I thought back to earlier in the year, during some big fight, when I’d shouted at him to stop treating me like I was white, fed up with what I felt was his disinterest in my individual experience, while simultaneously seeing that I hadn’t exactly shared the reality of that experience freely, for fear that he would reject me like the camping people of my youth.

Until that fight, I had too often conflated belonging with acceptance. I thought that in order to be accepted, I needed to keep my nonwhite perspective from my white boyfriend and his white family. That I needed to face the wilderness unafraid to be taken seriously as a nature writer. That I needed to camp like “camping people” — like white people — in order to camp at all. But I grow more certain each day that my fixation with belonging only ever backfires. If I’m not honest about who I am, how can anyone figure out how to accept me in the first place?

Salem listened when I fussed at him about not being white, and I got a little braver every day about expressing the ways that I am different from him rather than the same. And now, a year into dating, his brother tags along when I feel moved to approach strangers at swing sets just because they are Asian, even if it makes him nervous. And his sister has identified how to tell when I’m so embarrassed I want to die, as well as the exact tone of voice that will calm me down. We often talk about assimilation as if it were a one-way street, but it isn’t. It shouldn’t be.

I glanced at Salem as he stared into his phone and struggled to remember what I thought of him when we first met. Now, when I look at his face I feel the collapse of distance, the familiarity of a kind of home that you can’t buy, or drive to, or set up with tent poles.

“Hey,” I said. He looked at me. “You were right. Let’s go back to Brooklyn.”

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3g9eaKo via Blogger https://ift.tt/3iZAVC3

[indieks]

Not So Randomly | Part 1/5

🌟 Pairing : Im Changkyun (I.M) x Reader

🌟 Genre : Fluff, Angst

🌟 Word count : 6.3k

🌟 Synopsis : Whenever you cross the path of Im Changkyun, that guy you hate and that hates you, it seems to be the worst day of your life. But, strangely enough, it also becomes the best and most accurate of moments you've ever had. So, the more you randomly end up stucked with each other, the more a question can arise : is it really chance that has something against you, or is it serendipity that drives you one towards the other?

Next Part

🌟 A/N : I know, summer is over, and we all have to go back to school or to work… that’s why I decided to post these series that start right during summer school break and continue at the uni! I’m still not sure in how many parts I’m going to divide it, I’ll see along the way and update it soon!

After my first post for BTS’ Suga, I also wanted to show that I will write for other groups and other wonderful people such as… I.M hehehehe 😏

Anyway, above all, thank you for reading, hope you enjoy it! ♥

Disclaimer : any gifs or images used, even edited, are not mine and belong to their rightful owners!

***

  Summer. One word that made the kids at school go crazy while waiting for the last bell to ring, the teenagers and young adults go to the gym to tone their bodies or look for a job to spare money for some wild travel, and the parents worried for their wallets because of their need to book something far away from home so that they'll forget their workaholic life. But for you, it was one word that oddly gave you chills in spite of the heat it brought on.

It hadn't always been like that, no ; that gloomy feeling you had came when you turned fifteen. The same year you blew that additional candle, your parents asked for your help at work during the sunny season instead of sending you on vacation. They were selling food products, your mom holding a grocery shop from Mondays to Fridays, before joining your father on the weekends who was vending them at the marketplaces in the capital and its whereabouts. And when July came, they closed the shop to go from market to market, morning after morning and night after night, with you accompanying them occasionally. But most of the time, as they worked hard without a real break, you used to enjoy your holidays by going to your friends' rents, or to your grandparents' little but cozy houses further from your home.

You used to love the different markets you went to. You used to love their various scents, their joyful sellers, and the cheap or luxurious stuff they were full of. You used to lose yourself in the alleys of those big places to taste everything, to admire each pearl incrusted in the jewelries, each drawing on kitchen supplies and decorations, each sewing on leather bags and fabrics, before going back to your parents at noon.

However, that was before your fifteenth summer, when you had to wake up at 4 or 5 in the morning to set up the equipment and organize the presentation of the food, then shout the whole morning to catch the attention of clients, sometimes pack up things without messing up – which had happened to you numerous times because of nervousness –, and do it all over again at nighttime. Nevertheless, you still did the job without complaining, not denying how much effort it implied and how legit it was for your parents to ask for an additional pair of hands. But you couldn't say you were waiting for the end of the first half of the year to come with as much impatience as other students anymore.

This eighteenth summer should be different though. Your parents had decided to extend their commerce to Busan, and to take you with them. Even if the reason you were here in the first place wasn't the sea and sunbathing, but the gigantic covered market where you were going to sell products for the season, you were satisfied with the idea of being close to wild water, already dreaming of spending your afternoons on the beach before getting back to work, just to have the feeling of holidays you haven't really had for three years. But what made you even more excited, was that it was probably the last time you were ever going to follow this scheme, as next year college life and a whole new independence was waiting for you, without a doubt implying a new summer schedule with friends, far away from your parents and your responsibilities as a daughter.

A sweet vacation house had waited for you during 9 long months, as well as the amount of work that now tired you just by thinking of it, but you felt at ease while you were unpacking in your bedroom facing the sea, the thud of waves inciting you to take a step back and focus on the goods of being here. But as the first week went by, your alarm almost making your ear-drums bleed every time it rang loudly in the early and still dark morning, your positive mind and attitude were now clearly missing.

And if you had thought that having your days completely out of sync with the rest of people and not being able to properly visit Busan was sufficient to ruin your mood, as your sleepy-self consumed its vacant afternoon in bed instead of outside on the sand like you had pictured or maybe making some friends, it was until you met Im Changkyun. Until the second week you had been there, when your parents sent you to help that old lady who needed more hands at her stand than them who were still handling their own with skill.

You were nervous on your first day behind a stand with a stranger, despite the granny was lovely and was doing everything to make you comfortable, but being in an unknown city, an unknown market and without the pillar that were your parents, made you feel uneasy even more. Your hands were trembling as you were placing the bins containing the ingredients she sold and used for cooking delicious fried meals, and her popularity wasn't helping ; there wasn't a time when you could take a rest, people coming and going like crazy even in the first hours of the opening.

It was almost the end of your service when he showed up, or more precisely, when you accidentally bumped into him and dumped some sauce from your tub on his white tank top. The shock made him drop the carton he was carrying, full of porcelain kitchenware, some of them escaping their prison to explode on the floor, making a loud sound that drawn the attention of all the customers around. You had been walking too fast, coming from the small van parked behind the market where the grandma had food supplies she had pressed you to bring as you were almost running out of it.

"Fffffuuuuuck", the boy suddenly said, his voice low and deep but without a doubt laced with anger.

You were ashamed and panicked, the broken pieces of white plates laughing at you as you started to pick them up, quiet sorrys slipping out of your mouth.

"Don't you watch where you go?" he asked you and you finally stood up to look at him straight in the eye.

You didn't have the chance to meet pretty boys since you had arrived in town, it was not like they would come to the market in the morning if it meant giving up their sleep time, nor at night as they probably preferred street or fast food to your parent's fresh vegetables and kimchi. Except for this boy, who was confronting you right now, but sadly in this kind of situation that was making your cheeks burn of embarrassment and your heart fighting with your ribcage. Indeed, he had really nice looks, with the bangs of his light brown hair falling on his brows and eyes, an oval face with sharp eyes that killed you the instant you dared to greet him a timid smile, a long nose that seemed to have been carved in stone, and small lips that could create a smirk which you'll soon crave to smack him for.

"I'm really really sorry, I was in a hurry and I didn't see you, how can I-"

"Save it, let's go to my mother, you owe her your excuses" he cut you, grabbing the box again and pushing you with his wide shoulder when he passed you, silently inviting – or more like ordering – you to follow him.

With hands even more shaking than a few moments ago, you took your box and went to the granny's stand to excuse yourself, her gentle smile and reassuring comments about the incident soothing you instantly, but when you turned around and saw him darting his eyes at you while waiting, your blood froze in your body as your footsteps guided you to him without asking. The more you walked, the more the path seemed familiar to you, and you gasped when he stopped in front of a woman you recognized immediately. She was the beautiful lady at the stand right next to your parents', selling products she was cooking live as well as… kitchenware she probably had painted on herself. Beautiful kitchenware you just broke. You felt a new amount of shame piling upon the heap that already had bubbled inside of you when you captured the curious gazes of your parents seeing you coming back to them before 1 pm.

"Hey mom, I'm sorry but that girl bumped into me earlier and broke some of your plates" the boy stated while presenting the box to the lady who stopped what she was doing to take it calmly.

"Y/N! What have you done?!" your mother exclaimed, feeling even sorrier than you as you were supposed to ensure them a good image at the market by helping the granny, not creating a mess on the eighth day of your fresh arrival.

"It's okay! I have plenty of those, it can happen! Changkyun-ah, I hope you weren't rude to her, were you?" the woman said while smiling at you, signaling you to come close to her and you just did, your head hung low. "You didn't hurt yourself? Are you ok?" she asked as she was examining your hands.

"I'm fine, thank you. I'm really sorry, can I do something-"

"It's nothing Y/N. I had plenty of accidents when I was your age, don't worry" she eased you, your hands still in her beautiful and delicate ones. "I saw how you work when you were helping your parents last week, you are really devoted so you must have been too concentrated and didn't see my son! Where did you tell me she was helping?"

"With Mrs. Ahn" your father answered and you straightened yourself to see her smile at you.

"Changkyun, I know how bored you are when you're with me so how about you help Mrs. Ahn too? I'm sure Y/N is overworked by herself, you could help instead of doing nothing at home."

"No no no that's okay really" you quickly interfered, feeling embarrassed as you heard his grunt of annoyance.

If you could avoid being a burden and making him angry at you for having ruined his summer in addition of his clothes, you were willing to work even harder to prove you didn't need his help.

"Mom, I have friends to meet and things to do, I'm on holidays! Why are you doing this to me seriously?" he protested and you finally looked over your shoulder to see him standing in a nonchalant pose, his hands deep in the pockets of his black jogging while the red stain of hot sauce on his top was drying and turning brown.

"I'm tired of you doing nothing, it's just for the mornings and sometimes at night, you'll have plenty of time to hang with your friends! I'm pretty sure there are heavy bins to carry or ingredients to cut and your hands will be of great help so stop nagging, you're 18 years-old now you should work a little!" she grumbled before smiling at you who were still frozen in your wish to disappear into the ground.

"At 18 years-old I… I should enjoy my life mom! Before working till I get old, you know? That's why I enjoy not doing anything for the time I have left!"

His dramatic tone almost made you chuckle but you couldn't allow yourself to, or else he would have murdered you the instant you'd been left alone without your parents to witness.

"Cut your nonsense son, or do you want me to tell your dad you're ok to work with him at the company till the end of holidays? And it's going to be a full-time job this time!"

Changkyun rolled his eyes back and sighed, finally giving up – not without mumbling a few bad words to himself in the process – and he gave you the exact look you feared he would have, the one that told you he would hate you for the rest of his life, the one that should have warned you that everything would only get worse after this first disastrous encounter.

   ***

  The next morning, you were still fighting with the tiredness in your eyes as the anxiety of meeting Changkyun again had kept you up all night. You were debating with your inner self about whether you should excuse yourself one last time, or remain silent and leave him alone, but you still hadn't come up with an answer when he arrived around 7 am, a grey hoodie on as well as a pair of destroyed jeans. He was really attractive, even with his morning face and small bags under his eyes, even when he shot you his deadly look, even when he messed up his hair by putting his hand in it in frustration.

"Hello ma'am, I'm here to help, I'm the son of Mrs. Im" he said with his deep voice, even deeper as he woke up not too long ago.

He showed off his cocky demeanor as he didn't even greet you and made his way behind the big table you were occupied at preparing, placing nicely the cooked and marinated products.

"My mother and yours are sympathizing right now, but that doesn't mean we're going to be friends, or whatever", he suddenly said to your attention and you gave him a quick look to discover that his eyes weren't even bothering to acknowledge you. "They want me to spend some time with you, your mom said that you're bored the rest of the day and have no friends here, but let me be clear : I have other things to do than to carry a burden around during my free time, most of all a clumsy girl. You ruined my summer y'know that?"

His gaze from the day before should have warned you, but you still were slapped violently by the hands of shock when he spat these words with spitefulness. You did bump into him and create a regretful situation, but you did not grow his mom's idea into her head… Did you?

"I'm here to help the old lady so that my mother leaves me alone, I'm not here for you, don't make up any ideas, got it?" he added with a monotone voice and you looked up at him as he was finally landing his deep brown eyes on you, but without a glimpse of life in them.

"Don't worry, I don't need your help. Sorry if my mom has bothered you", you simply answered, quickly going back to what you were doing to hide the mix of anger and embarrassment that was burning your reddening cheeks.

You had hoped that he would not pay any attention to you, not that he would make you pay, but his saltiness and rudeness were more on point than what any human being could imagine : starting from his first day next to you, he didn't miss any chance to make his presence unbearable. He pointed every wrong move you made and grumbled every time he did, pretending to be an expert as he had accompanied his mother more than once to this marketplace ; he greeted cheerfully clients when he was serving them but never failed to play the poker face with you, while the old lady did not hear or see any of this electric situation, simply happy that two lovely teenagers had volunteered to help ; he let you do most of the work, playing stupid games on his phone or pretending to be unpacking and cutting the ingredients to cook but taking never-ending time in doing so. You weren't the type to hate on people but Changkyun had made himself odious, so much that even his looks couldn't save him anymore, as the only sight of him made you angry. Quickly, your guilt disappeared in limbo like your positive mind had done a week ago, as you came to wish you had dumped every single bit of the sauce right on his head.

Like that, your relationship – if you could name the poor exchanges you had a relationship – became him nagging you and you nagging him, your discussions restricted by the vocabulary of disrespect and sarcasm, even if you still played the role of good kids once you returned to your mothers, pretending to leave to spend some good time together at the beach although you parted ways after plotting the story you would both tell your parents to be credible. If you were being honest, you enjoyed being alone and his company wasn't necessary to make you happy. He was just your perfect excuse to escape being with your parents during all your free time and wander in Busan's streets or maybe finally feel the sand of the beach or the cold of sea waves like you had been craving to do.

However, only a week had gone by and it had seemed like an eternity. You were already exhausted by this tensed situation you were plunged into each morning you stepped into the market, and instead of taking a walk once you were done with work like you had planned to, you still pursued your routine of going to sleep. What pissed you even more was that above all, you found him beautiful although he was being the most experienced asshole in the world with you. You found him beautiful when he looked annoyed – which was most of the time –, you found him beautiful when his brows furrowed, you found him beautiful when his tone went under the one of a vault, and you found him beautiful in each one of his outfits that were supposed to be picked up carelessly but suited him nonetheless – even with the ridiculous apron you had to wear. 

You choked yourself mentally every time you landed your eyes on him with too much attention, printing the image of his handsome profile with his sharp nose in your brain, and with even more vigor when you felt thrilled at the sight of the smile he never greeted you but that was pretty as hell. Hell, yes, because that guy was the devil itself, never failing to throw away his fake angel looks when there was only the two of you to spit venom and burn you with his bashful words.

Still, you couldn't be thankful enough for the shell you've been living in since you were little, not letting others reach your emotions easily and hurt you the way Changkyun could have done to a more sensible person. You were also proud of your ability to ignore him and to fight back, your fiery conversations not lasting long or almost making you laugh when you triumphed at making him shut up or annoyed. As tiring as it was for your nerves, you could have dealt quietly with it like you always had, if chance hadn't decided to go in your way and add oil to the fire pit Changkyun and you were battling in. 

Indeed, by the third week of July, you finally found the courage to furrow the streets of the city and to enjoy the little time you had to yourself instead of dying in your bedroom. But a few hours after you had parted ways with Changkyun, hoping not to see each other until the next morning, you ended up meeting each other by pure coincidence.

The first time, you were walking on the promenade with the marine wind in your hair, listening to your music and overall floating in your bubble, when you saw him arriving in front of you, surrounded by five other guys who were laughing cheerfully. He stopped and so you did, rolling your eyes at the same time and you immediately turned on your heels to flee the crime scene that would have occurred if he had opened his mouth in front of his friends, without a doubt feeling full of confidence to bash you in their presence. Weirdly though, your heart skipped a bit at the sight of his wet and sandy hair fighting against the breeze and of his naked torso, broad and outlined, telling you he had just dipped into the sea minutes ago. However, the absence of eyes in the back of your head prevented you from seeing how he only stared at you without breathing, at your hair shining under the sun, at your bare legs revealed by your high waisted shorts that married perfectly your curves, at your determined gait taking you far away from him ; he lost himself at your sight so bad that one of his friends had to nudge his side for him to stop ogling you any longer.

The second time, you had decided to escape the sea after seeing him the day before, so you randomly took some lovely streets, entering some boutiques and offering yourself some new clothes, simply loving your me-time. Until you came across his figure in a park you had chosen to enter into, the blossoming trees and the sight of a kiosk seducing your eyes and heart. 

Changkyun was sitting on a bench under a tree with the same friends you had quickly seen, eating some snacks as they were chatting and laughing, and this time your heart didn't miss a beat, no, it quickened its pace to the point you thought you would die. He was wearing a white long sleeved shirt with black jeans and sneakers, and a white cap was covering his greyish-brown hair parting in two on his forehead. Again, his face looked as tired as yours must have been with your early morning activities, but he still was gorgeous, even more because he wasn't wearing that jaded mask he had with you. You hesitated to turn around and go somewhere else as he didn't see you yet, but by the time you were reaching a decision, he was already looking at you and even walking in your direction, his traits again as hard as ever.

"Are you following me or what?" he said in a hushed voice.

"What? I'm not!" you exclaimed but the apparent blush of your cheeks and your elusive pupils made him believe the contrary.

"Then what are you doing here? Busan is big you know, how come we meet today as well? Last week I didn't see you at all!"

"What's wrong Changkyun?" asked one of his friends behind his back, standing on his feet and revealing his tall and imposing figure, but his cute face when his lips curved into a smile helped you staying calm.

"Nothing hyung, she's the girl I'm working with and I think she's followed me here" Changkyun answered with a clearer tone, and for the first time he addressed you a smile, but it was full of slyness.

"I didn't, I'm just visiting, I stayed at home last week that's why you didn't see me, now if you don't mind I'll go" you answered, your irritation apparent in your voice as you passed him and quickly greeted his friends with a small bow before storming to the kiosk to hide yourself forever.

Your body was clearly expressing the effect the boy had on you when you saw him under other circumstances than the marketplace : your hands were wet, your heart crazy, and your legs were going to abandon their functions if you didn't sit down in the following seconds. Why the hell am I feeling like that? He's handsome, yes, but he's just a bugger!

"Why didn't you invite her to hang out with us? She's cute" asked the most muscular of the group, once you were out of sight.

"I don't like her, she's annoying and childish, and I have to work because of her clumsy ass remember" Changkyun explained, sitting down angrily on the bench before taking off his cap as he also had started to feel sweat forming on his forehead since he had seen you.

   ***

   You swore Busan couldn't have felt any tinier, because you didn't understand how in the world you could randomly meet your summer enemy everywhere you went to in the city. Today was a Thursday, the sun was up in the sky and you had wished to at least soak your feet in the blue sea, and maybe enjoy a cocktail in a café-bar which had drawn your attention a few days ago, with its youngster-surfer vibe and its simple but appetizing menu. The barman also wasn't unpleasant, but you hushed your girly silliness as you entered around 4 pm, your hair wet after you finally had taken a sea bath and tried to get your pale skin to brown a little.

You hadn't gone further than the market surroundings for a week after the two times you had met Changkyun, too scared to tempt the chance that seemed to be coming after you, and because he hadn't forgot the next morning to tell you rudely not to follow him, to what you had answered he was too full of himself and that he should fuck off. However, with the beautiful weather on this Thursday, without a cloud to be seen, you couldn't hide yourself anymore and decided not to care about how Changkyun would react if you came across each other again.

You should have known better, that you weren't lucky enough to defy chance, fate, or whatever had chosen you to play with. You were sipping on your fruity cocktail silently, sitting on the terrace that had a nice view of the promenade full of trees and flowers and of the beach only a few meters away, when you saw him through your sunglasses. You almost whined of annoyance, on the verge of going crazy about how he seemed to be like a ghost haunting you since last week. Once again, his hair was wet and curling a little, with its silver glints revealed by the sun, while he had switched his lazy outfit from the morning with a pair of jeans shorts and a white top under a grey cardigan.

He was with the same group of guys as the previous times, who were really loud and happy, and when he was about to make his way to the bar, Changkyun stopped in his tracks as he acknowledged your presence, his face falling into some unreadable expression, probably because he was as taken aback as you by the way you constantly met. To elude any suspicions, he quickly followed his mates who were cheerfully greeting the pretty barman – Kihyun if you had read his name well.

Obviously, a nice weather implied drinking outside with the seaside breeze, and you found yourself facing the table of the boys who finally noticed you, giving both Changkyun and you curious looks before one of them found a subject of conversation to distract themselves. During the first ten minutes, you felt his sharp eyes on you, with his chin a bit raised, giving him this bad boy aura he was always seeking in front of you and that made your heart weak despite all the hate you had for him. He suddenly got out of his vest, revealing his arms under the rolled sleeves of his T-Shirt, and then he placed the side of his face in the palm of his hand, his pupils never quitting your frame in the process. Again, cold sweat and chills : again, tachycardia ; again, numb legs.

Soon enough though, a bunch of girls passed by and greeted the band, staying up next to their table, and it finally grasped Changkyun's attention, freeing you from your unexplained sensations. You couldn't prevent your gaze to go back and forth between the sea and his group, hiding behind your sunglasses, to observe their affinities – maybe he has a girlfriend? Now that you came to think of it for the second time, even if you had been with one another for now almost three weeks, you knew nothing about each other. The first time was a few nights ago, when your father had asked you this question during dinner :

"So what about Changkyun? What kind of boy is he? How come you never talk about him! With all the time you spend together and the things you do, you must have a strong bond by now, don't you? It's true that we get pretty attached to our summer friends in no time!"

You had stayed quiet for a few seconds, building something to come up with as you had faced the truth : you didn't know a single thing about him, what he liked and what he didn't, his friends, his passions, his ambitions, and you surely didn't have his number nor any of his social networks' accounts. As you had looked through your memories quickly, all you could have pointed at was him listening to some rap music in his headphones early in the morning while you were installing, or him having a great appetite when it came to eat the meals the granny offered you, or him playing RPG games on his phone whenever he had the time, or him meeting these hyungs to hang out once you were done with your morning service, but that was all. In some way though, that was also enough to tell you you've been observing him with way too much attention, some attention he shouldn't get in the first place, and realizing it had tensed you. Changkyun and you were just enemies of circumstances, living up a lie in front of your parents that didn't take the time to look through it and never grabbed the chance to uncloak you just by asking you this exact question about each other's well-being or tastes.

"Hummm… I… We're not really talkative, you know, so… Yeah, he's nice to hang out with" you had mumbled before taking a long sip in your cup of water.

"He's such a charming boy" your mother had commented, and you had hidden your need to puke at how this adjective sounded awful in your ears. "I'm amazed at how everything goes well between you and for your last summer like this. I didn't think this would happen! He sure will be a good friend, that's beautiful sweetheart."

These outings are what never happened, mom, you had wanted to answer, but you had only looked down at your plate and wrongfully nodded in agreement, regretting to be lying to your parents since so long but too deep in it for you to get out. This whole comedy was a pure joke to you, something you didn't take too seriously to feel really guilty as the life or death of the boy mattered to you as much as one of a fly. At least, you convinced yourself so, somehow perfectly aware of the weird feelings you were getting because of him from time to time, when you really looked at him, or when, like at this exact moment, you met him by coincidence outside the market, discovering another Changkyun, a lively one, a smiling one, an apparently funny one as he made everyone at his table laugh with his derp faces or his comments you couldn't hear.

"Kkukkungiiiiiie, are you coming to the party next Friday?"

The voice of a girl shook you out of your thoughts, and you caught the annoyed eyes of Changkyun going straight in your direction, over the shoulder of the model-looking boy of the team who had his back facing you. You didn't hold back your quiet laugh to make him feel ridiculous. Kkukkungie? Seriously? The boy rolled his eyes, clearly pissed that you had heard that somehow cute but most of all silly nickname, and this time his angry look didn't stop you from smiling as you were making fun of him. Not too long after, the girls were gone, their laughs still tinting in your ear-drums like birds singing too happily, and that was when the pretty barman came to serve you the dessert you had ordered as your afternoon snack, a key lime pie. You suddenly felt shy when he engaged the conversation :

"Are you here alone for holidays?"

His voice was really calm and sweet, like the bright smile he gave you that almost closed his eyes in a cute way.

"Oh uh… No, I'm here to help my parents at the market" you answered, smiling back.

"Oh I see! I'm Kihyun by the way, you are?"

"Y/N."

He offered you his hand and you shook it gently, before taking it back to your lap.

"So where are you from?" he asked again.

"Seoul! But I really love it here" you admitted, surprising yourself as you let the words roll through your tongue instead of cutting off the discussion.

Changkyun was observing you from behind, his brows furrowed as he saw one of his hyungs talking to you, but even more when the latter turned back and shouted :

"Ya guys! She's new here and all alone and you didn't even invite her at your table! What kind of gentlemen are you seriously, you're making me feel ashamed!"

Once again, you wanted to kill yourself for dragging people involuntarily into your situation and forcing them to hang out with you, first Changkyun at the old lady's stand, now all of his friends that were staring at you. You were shaking your head from left to right to express that everything was really fine but it was too late :

"Ohhhh but she's the girl Changkyun is working with! Sure, come and join us!" one of them exclaimed as if he hadn't seen you before when he clearly had, making it even more awkward.

However, when Kihyun nodded his head in their direction while smiling at you, you realized you had no other choice but to do as you were told, being polite and appreciative when all you wanted to do was to run away from this place and quickly. Remind me why did I go near the sea again?

"Hi, I'm Jooheon" said the one who had just invited you and when he smiled, two deep dimples appeared on his chubby cheeks, making him a ray of sun in an instant. His hair was chocolate brown and slicked back on his head, and he had even sharper eyes than Changkyun.

You sat down next to him where an empty spot seemed to have waited for you, and introduced yourself back, waiting for the others to do the same. On your left was sitting the model-boy, with his dark hair and his tall but slim frame, whose name you now knew was Hyungwon ; Shownu, the tall and massive boy who had interfered the last time, had short brown hair and tanned skin ; the one named Hoseok had his hair bleached and prominent muscles ; and finally, Minhyuk, who also had brown hair, smiled at you and seemed to be the most talkative and excited of the band as his introduction was the longest. Overall, they were guys with enjoyable looks and fashion styles, but to your great despair, not even one beat the handsomeness of Changkyun in your eyes. Quickly, Minhyuk made you talk and you did your best to forget the presence of your market partner, almost enjoying how the whole situation was annoying him as you saw his leg jump up and down since you sat at his table.

"Why didn't you introduce us to her earlier Changkyun-ah? She's really fun" Jooheon said as if he was outraged and you smiled in victory, defying the designated one who was, for the first time, avoiding your gaze as his eyes were drifting to the sea, his brows knotting and his bottom lip trapped between his teeth.

"I already told you hyung, she's not my friend so there's no reason for you to be" he hummed between gritted teeth, his head still turned away from you.

"You don't get to decide who we hang out with you brat!" protested Minhyuk before he slapped his shoulder. "Hey Y/N, why don't you come to my pool party next Friday?"

You weren't against having a little fun, and you didn't need to stay with them all night ; maybe you would meet some other really nice people and could avoid Changkyun. After all, you deserved at least one party for this summer, and maybe it was the only opportunity you'll ever have before going back to work and hiding yourself in Busan’s streets with the hopes of not getting surprised by Changkyun’s ghost-like appearances like you had another time today. The boy had finally turned his body towards you and was looking at you with daring eyes, but you couldn't care even less. He had been the one who had started to build your hateful relationship even if his anger had been legit at the beginning, but you were not going to give him some satisfaction by avoiding having some fun.

"Yeah, sure, thank you! I've been dying to go out!"

The boys whooped in satisfaction while the jaw of Changkyun dropped, showing he wasn't expecting your boldness, but anyway, he still had to deal with it.

    To be continued...

 A/N : I’ll try to update Part 2 in a few days! Thank you again for reading... Any comments good or bad are welcomed as usual!

[kchatjjigae]

Stephanie would give you a reporting on her BTS experience but she’s  dead. Totes dead. Killed by Kpop. Time of death, Friday, March 24th, approximately 8.30 pm. She died happy. May God have mercy on her pervy noona soul.

After meeting up with all factions of the Kpop Nerd Herd, we gathered at a Biergarten outside the Prudential Center–because apparently, pregaming kpop is a thing. Also, get this! The doors to the concert actually opened at 5.30! Holy smokes. Usually, my biggest complaint to kpop concerts is the fact that they are still loading in guests way past the time when the concert is supposed to start causing us, even with seated tickets, to have to get there way early in order to make sure we don’t miss anything. This time, nope, we walked through the doors, right through security and directly to our seats, not a single line to be waited in. It was a close second part of the evening. (First part of course, being anything having to do with BTS.)

As we all bought out tickets separately, we were all seated in various areas in the arena. I was by myself in section 7. Turns out 7 was one of the better sections of the group, beaten out only by Alexis who lucked out with P1 with sound check. Alexis who got in line, with her tent and sleeping bag, at 3am. Gads! I’d say that was crazy, but she got close, really close. Close enough to have full on Alexis/Jungkook interaction. I’m dead? I’m guessing she’s probably headed to the plot next to me.

I get to my SEAT, last to fill in the row, seated next to a J-HOPE and a Rap Monster bias. Not a bad place to be. My seat was right at the corner of the stage extension. The crowd screamed their excitement with every change of the monitors with their music video rotation. You know, because we kpop fans have no chill. We are like the anti chill. Eternally grateful they either allowed my camera in or didn’t find it in my bag, as my phone battery situation was scary–could you imagine what a sad, sad fangirl I would be if I came out of that thing without photographic proof I was there? Nope. Hellz nope.

Soon (as I really slipped in just moments before the show started) the lights darkened and due to my corner seat, I could literally see that all that separated us from BTS was a thin curtain. Yes, me and my (Let’s just come out and admit it) hands down favorite band were in the same country, the same state, zip code, building, room, we were breathing the same air. It’s a heady experience.

Then the curtain was gone. And there they were. Thank goodness I did have the camera as my memory of the thing is a hazy mess of happiness, fangirl squeeeeing, and BTS sweat.

After a disastrous attempt at video-chatting the experience with the McFeeleys  (damn you, cell service at the Prudential Center!) It was just me and the boys…and like 13000 other screaming fans.

Now. I’m not one of those girls who like any sort of sneak peak of what’s going to happen at a concert.  I avoid set lists. I run and way from fan cams. I feel like the surprise is part of the experience. This one going in though, especially since several members of the herd went to both nights, there were some details I was unable to avoid.

From the escaped set list, I knew everyone did a solo from the Wings album. I wasn’t really looking forward to this as I haven’t really listened to the wings album and I am under the assumption that I don’t like them, preferring my BTS as a whole rather than pieces. I knew, from Regina, that the costumes were made from lots of velvet, lots of sparkles.

Hrmmm…. BTS in sparkles? In velvet? And finally, I learned that they had some sound issues the first night where the background music was louder than the voices, which I wanted to believe that they would have fixed the second night around. Second-night people! When possible, always choose night two. Wait. Unless this would make it harder for me to get tickets to night two in which case, woah, first night, first night is the bomb! Get ’em fresh! Jet lag is sexy!

So, that being said, they sang the first one, being awesome of course, but then, since I was trying to live chat, I missed a good portion of it. However. The next song? BLEW MY EVER LOVIN’ BTS FANGRRRL MIND. What was it? Bapsae! Gah! I love this song so much, and not only that but, though I’m not really a ‘ooh look at that dance’ person, I’m all, look at that dance! This is the one song I honestly didn’t think that they would play, and I was literally sad that I’d never get to see them perform that awesome song and adorable dance in person. But I was wrong!!! They played it. It was awesome. The only thing was I couldn’t decide between video and photo so I basically put both down and just jammed out. Screaming my head off of course, but still jamming. If only they’d played it on the extended stage, it would have been perfect.

Side note. Just lost a massive amount of post due to a faulty save draft button. Endeavoring to continue. Harumph.

So. Unlike other bands that had multiple stages ahemBigbangahem BTS actually spent a fair amount of time on both stages, which made me–and the Rap Monster bias next to me very happy. Every time we caught sight of that front stage trap door opening, it was arm thumping and squeeeeing. This was also good because of their lighting choices made it so that anytime they were on the back stage, all video evidence of them were just white glowing orbs of happiness and gyrations. 

Also, you’ll notice my photos are a little Rap Monster and J-HOPE heavy. This was not an artistic choice. Okay. So maybe it was a bit. I couldn’t help myself. However, in my defense, they did spend a great deal of time on my side of the stage. It was almost like they knew and wanted to hang out with me. Plus I was egged on by the realization that I would make some of the members of our crew very happy documenting a little J-Hope. I wasn’t wrong.

Now. As I mentioned before, I did actually know they would be performing their solo stuff, and I have to admit it, I’m not the hugest fan, even after seeing them performed live. They aren’t terrible, they just, to me, aren’t very memorable. Except maybe Hobi’s song? Was he the one who sang about his mom? Oh, and Rap Monster when we all shouted that we loved him because his song is about not loving himself or something? Maybe if I give the songs more of a listen I’ll come to appreciate them more. 

Another song I kind of wished I’d been prepared for? Because I kind of lost my shit? Cypher 4. Holy fudge guys. I always meant to write a post on this song as, though I refused to listen to Wings, I do have it on my phone and one day I was on the train, heard this mind-blowingly awesome song that immediately hooked me in–turns out it was Cypher 4.

Gah! I love this song. To see the rap line out there all sexy strutting and growls it was flat-out amazeballs. There is really no other word to describe it. The jackets they wore. The saunters. The interaction. Not kidding, if they ever decided to eventually do a rap line sub unit, I would be all in. 

We should now probably talk about their costumes. Regina was right. They were heavy on the velvet, heavy on the sparkles, which is just weird, isn’t it? Thinking of their past concepts? Comparing BTS image from now to the little wannabe thug bunnies they first debuted as? Even their solo stuff was bedazzled.

My favorites, of course, will have to be the long robes that the rap line wore for the Cypher, but also the red knitted outfits they wore when they first came to the front stage. Jimin in that oversized red sweater?

Although everything was so oversized and layered it looked a bit like the outfits were actually eating the band. But who can blame them? Nom, Nom, Nom baby. The costume that did not go over well? Hands down would have to be what the KPNH referred to as the pink pearled Jackie O jackets. Seriously? What were they thinking? Whoever came up with that concept should probably…not be allowed to do that again. 

The stages itself was pretty simple, no fuss, no big show, the most they had were a few rising pillars in the back

and what appeared to be a glass phone booth that Rap Monster went into at the end of his performance and…I want to say Taehyung came out of at the beginning of his?

Hoseok had a chair, Yoongi an upright piano, but all in all, it was pretty minimal. They did have some backup dancers, but they were fairly unnecessary, really it just distracted from the main event rather than added to it–with the exception of the time that they lifted Jimin–that was pretty freaking cool. Go Jimin, go.

I think it showed that you really you could just have a great performance be a great performance. It’s like when good singers use autotune. Why? It certainly doesn’t add anything. And why bother with the expense?

There was a fun thing that they did at the end with the light sticks. The venue handed out colored bags that you could put your light stick in (the JHope fan grabbed me one and told me I could just use it with my cell phone battery–I totally would have if I hadn’t already run out of battery.) They handed out each section a color, so that at the encore when they boys came out again, the stadium would be lit up like a rainbow. That was pretty nice.

Rap Monster talked about how all colors could enjoy their music–or something like that–I was pretty much a wreck at that point, so I may have missed his meaning. 

Hands down this was one of the best concerts I’ve been to. Not just because the guys were there performing their asses off, but also knowing that I was there with almost all of my friends (shout out Cherry Cordial! Have fun at your concert soon!) were there in the stadium with me.

Knowing we were all having the same experience, knowing how much each and every one of us love this band, knowing that after this we would all get together and talk and squeee and laugh over the whole thing? Yeah, that’s what pushed the night over the edge for me and I will really never, ever forget it. 

Sappy much?

Anywhoo–I took way too many photos and here is a gallery of just a fraction of them….

The Wings Tour Or How BTS Murdered The Fangirl Stephanie would give you a reporting on her BTS experience but she's  dead. Totes dead. Killed by Kpop.

[instantdeerlover]

White Open Spaces added to Google Docs

White Open Spaces

For my immigrant family, outdoor recreation was not part of our usual vacation plans. Could learning to camp be the pandemic escape I needed?

Wei Tchou is a Brooklyn-based writer and former non-camper working on a book about her family and the cultural history of ferns.

“I know you can do it,” said Salem, smiling at me with encouraging eyes, even though I didn’t know the first thing about building a campfire. It was meant to be a gesture of sweetness that he wanted me to build a hearth for his younger siblings on our first campout together. But I couldn’t read it as anything but an act of inscrutable emotional terrorism, doled out to a devoted girlfriend whose only crime was being accomodating enough to come on this stupid camping trip in the first place. I covered my face with my hands to hide my tears.

A part of me had hoped I would take to camping as if the woods were my true home all along. Like a captive platypus released back into her highland waterways, my real self would shake off such earthly superficialities as shelter, safety, and lumbar support as I became just another creature of nature, flowers weaving through my hair as sparrows sang overhead. Instead, my first experience of camping found me crying next to a gaping pit of ashes in front of my boyfriend’s family.

My first experience of camping found me crying next to a gaping pit of ashes in front of my boyfriend’s family.

I thought of my Chinese immigrant parents, who would likely shudder at the thought of me sleeping on a dirt floor and getting my vagina so close to the ground while peeing that something might plausibly climb in. My parents did not immigrate to this country for me to have something crawl into my vagina! I thought.

How could I have ever been so delusional as to think that I would tolerate, much less enjoy, a life in the woods, when very little in my 32 years of life has indicated an ease with anything less than the cool breeze of an air-conditioning unit, four bars of LTE, and good Chinese takeout just around the corner?

 Minimalist camping, as it turns out, requires a surprising amount of stuff.

The answer to this question is most likely the same as yours “in these unprecedented times,” or ITUT, as a friend of mine likes to refer to the narrowing of life since COVID-19 spread to our coast. I was sick of being cooped up in the city but anxious about making the pandemic worse by contracting it, spreading it, or putting service workers at greater risk with my selfish longing for a cappuccino.

And also, I recently finished a partial manuscript of my book, which is in part a personal history of my interest in ferns. It’s hard not to spend, say, four years of one’s adult life writing about the wonders of ferns and nature without feeling like an abject phony for being suspicious about any immersion in wilderness beyond just, like, looking at it from the car.

So, when Salem’s younger sister, Pearl, and younger brother, Hazel, who are both outdoors enthusiasts, proposed that we all go camping together up in Maine last month, I felt uncharacteristically enthusiastic. Camping! A way to safely spend time with loved ones somewhere other than Zoom. Camping! A way to prove t,hat I could be as much of an expert on ferns as some unkempt white dude in Chacos. If I could learn to camp, it seemed to me, then maybe I could also be free.

Julia Cameron, the author of the cult ’70s-era workbook for creatives The Artist’s Way, would call this confluence of desires with opportunity a synchronicity, which is just a woo-woo term for coincidences that fall in your favor, she asserts, when you thoroughly believe in your art. Back in March, I roped Salem, who was quarantining with me in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and his sister, Pearl, who lives in Maine, into tackling the self-help classic, whose “spiritual path to higher creativity” winds through a tidy 12 weeks — enough time, I reasoned, that the lockdown would be over well before we finished. It was a welcome distraction from the aching distress of watching the daily death toll tick up and washing our hands until they were raw. Our group expanded to include Salem and Pearl’s mother, Betsy (who actually is an artist), Pearl’s partner, Alec (who is an artist, but for ice cream), Pearl’s best friend, Peyton (who works on behalf of environmental justice), and finally Hazel, after he graduated from college over Zoom.

Talk to my family about spending a stretch of time in the woods and they’ll assume you were exiled for doing something very bad, like owning land or refusing to become a doctor.

It alarmed me at first that I was an outsider in my own self-help group — the new girlfriend in a weekly video chat of Salem’s family and friends, and, just as acutely, the only nonwhite person. But I grew close to them as we completed tasks that encouraged our childlike sense of wonder: wandering outside to gather leaves and flowers, collaging our dream lives. One writing exercise asked us to name activities that we wished, as children, we’d had the freedom to try. I found myself absentmindedly listing mountain biking, rock climbing, hiking, and, surprisingly, camping.

What the fuck, I thought, immediately troubled by what appeared to be a repressed desire to become woodsy. In my mind, woodsiness conjured images of beautiful, sunned white people looking inexplicably chic in technical gear and tangled hair, unbothered by the elements — the kind of person whose insouciant athleticism and confidence in using the terms “suffering” and “challenging” interchangeably did not belie a childhood of Suzuki method and Saturday school and the lifelong condition that every decision you make must justify the sacrifices your family made for you to simply be alive.

In my predominantly white Appalachian hometown, I had felt alienated by how casual and insistent people were about outdoor recreation. (Talk to my family about spending a stretch of time in the woods and they’ll assume you were exiled for doing something very bad, like owning land or refusing to become a doctor.) Unlike turning the radio on to learn pop songs or begging your mother to buy you a pair of sweatpants with “JUICY” written on the butt, learning to camp was impossible without someone to show you how. And the only people who might show me how were the same assholes who rejected me, even if I could sing along to every ’N Sync song, unconvincingly shaking my hips in baby-pink terry cloth. Along with how I looked, it was just another obvious way of understanding that no matter what I tried to become, I would never really belong.

 Setting up the tent was less puzzle-like than I’d thought.  From left to right: Pearl, PJ the dog, Hazel, and Salem

After I moved to New York City, I was proud to be able to finally reject woodsiness entirely. Here, I found belonging with people who, like me, found “camping people” to be perplexing and objectionable. I left behind the fear of being patronized for simply wanting to sleep in a bed with central air blowing on my face for the rest of my life. It was devastating to have to admit to myself, and then to my Artist’s Way group, that I had always secretly dreamed of seeing myself out there in the wilderness — tending a fire and drinking a tin cup of coffee in the foggy, crisp morning — strong enough to shoulder a pack over rough, pastoral terrain.

Call it another synchronicity that after Salem and I met on Tinder (an app that literally runs on synchronicities), we discovered that we were from two towns hugging opposite sides of the same Appalachian mountain range. Yet Salem had grown up camping, even if he had later diverged from his woodsy siblings, fleeing the mountains for the city. As we drove north for our camping adventure, I contemplated the cruel joke that now, as an adult, I was off to assimilate to the white hobby I’d rejected with fierce vehemence all of my life, with my white boyfriend and his white family who were from the same white part of the country I’d spent my entire life attempting to escape.

 Our lakeside campsite was beautiful, if car-accessible.

Any self-worth I’d managed to cling to evaporated as soon as Salem, Pearl, Hazel, and I — in preparation for our trip — walked into a camping store, whose floor was marked all over in blue tape to indicate where customers might stand to stay six feet apart. In part, my insecurity had to do with the fact that I’d poisoned myself the day before eating dried apricots, forgetting that apricots are a stone fruit, which I am allergic to. (Another synchronicity?) But really it was my intimidation about entering a store that said it was for camping, yet seemed only to sell racks and racks of long metal thingies and neon fabric bags attached to larger neon fabric bags. All the products were puzzles to solve, rather than recognizable pieces of equipment — a tent, for instance, that I might look at and think, Wow, that’s a great tent! My reluctance to touch things in stores since the pandemic began only made the process worse. Like, I knew I needed to buy a sleeping bag but felt stupid trying to choose one by staring as hard as I could at various lumpy sacks of nylon.

If the allure of camping evokes a certain rugged minimalism, the reality is strikingly fussy.

Sensing my panic, Pearl asked if I’d like to go take a look at tin cups in the cooking section, and I was relieved. I know food, I know cooking, I thought, puffing out my chest as we walked. But to my bewilderment, anything I might recognize in a kitchen was again abstracted to pieces of plastic, or sinister-looking canisters of gas and gadgets that promised to boil water in under 30 seconds (but, why!).

“Wei, look,” Pearl said, as I stared into the abyss of a collapsible plastic bowl. Grinning, she presented me with an enamel tin cup printed with a graphic of a lantern, and I sighed in recognition as she placed it in my hands. For drinking coffee out of! So sturdy! So cute! I thought. It was $20 and I threw it greedily into my basket — had it been $200, I still would have wanted it, for its familiarity, for its having the decency of looking like exactly what it was.

 Shopping for camping supplies was triggering — and expensive.

If the allure of camping evokes a certain rugged minimalism, the reality is strikingly fussy. You need a lot of stuff; the stuff is very expensive, and without experience, it’s hard to figure out what kind of stuff you’re even going to need. And none of it is going to make you feel woodsy, really — mostly it will just make you feel broke, staring at a two-foot-long receipt, registering that you’ve blown $650 in less than half an hour on the bare minimum of supplies.

It can make you furious to think about, especially during a pandemic when there are few options to escape the city, and the one that seems easy and cheap and safe turns out to be so psychologically and financially demanding that I, for one, would have given up upon entry at the store if I wouldn’t have felt even worse to let Salem and his siblings down.

I was still fuming about all of this when Salem suggested we camp out in Pearl’s backyard to test out our new equipment. Though I was feeling defeated, I followed along as he pulled out tent rods and began assembling them over a plastic tarp. I found that assembly was surprisingly intuitive — not puzzle-like at all — and before long, we were straightening out another piece of tarp over a modular mesh structure. We took turns staking its corners into the dirt, and in spite of myself, I couldn’t help but feel proud, admiring the neat little orange tent before us.

That night, I fell asleep in my new sleeping bag listening to rain drum the fabric over my head. All of my frustrations unexpectedly melted into a sweet, peaceful feeling that this small space, with its sounds and its funny mesh pockets and zippers, was mine. I was suddenly a child overcome by wonder, the anxieties and paranoia of the past few months dissipating as I observed little spiders scurrying in from the rain under the fly. They parachuted around on their silks as Salem snored softly, far away already in a distant dream.

 Dinner was a delicious hodgepodge.

Our campsite was situated on a farm nestling an ocean bay — salt breezes rolled through the open windows of our car as we puttered along a long path of RVs, campers, and tents. The first thing I noticed was that very few people were wearing masks — we’d all been required to prove we’d been tested for COVID-19 before we booked. I marveled at the fact that it was the first time in almost half a year that it seemed okay to observe the noses and mouths of so many strangers, going about their days uninterrupted by obsessive ritual sanitization of their bodies and possessions.

The next thing I noticed was that I didn’t have to carry anything more than a few feet from car to campsite, which, by the way, presided over a spectacular waterfront view, no walking necessary. It turns out there are degrees of camping, folks — a fact I was a little mad to find out. There was even an organic ice cream stand on the premises (which did, for the record, observe social-distancing protocols) where Pearl, Hazel, and I would circle back later to share a cup of s’mores-flavored ice cream, studded generously with marshmallow fluff and graham cracker crumbles.

Have camping people selfishly stoked the conspiracy that you have to strap on 50 pounds of gear and scale K2 every time you go camping to keep non-campers from their delicious ice cream stands? I contemplated this as we drew closer to our site, but my attention was drawn toward several figures playing on a swing set.

“Asians,” I whispered urgently, pointing them out through my window.

One privilege of being a journalist is the shamelessness with which I feel I can approach strangers, and Asian strangers in particular, to ask about their experiences, because, well, it’s my job. After we set up our tents, Hazel humored me by coming along as I stalked across the field toward several preteens at the campsite’s playground.

“I’m going to wait over here,” Hazel told me, stopping tentatively by the swing set, as I approached two of the older kids, introduced myself as a writer, and asked if I could chat with them.

I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of pride and relief in registering that the most beautiful campsite of all was made by the only nonwhite people I’d seen.

“So, like, I’ve only seen white people out here,” I told them, trying to make my eyes smiley rather than threatening above my mask. They giggled and looked at each other. “Are you guys from around here?” I asked.

“We’re from Brooklyn,” they said, and I laughed, because of course they were. They told me that they normally vacationed in Japan this time of year, to visit family, but given the pandemic they had to stay in the States. Camping was popular in Japan, too, they said, pointing in the direction of their campsite, which featured an impossibly chic yurt flanked by a large shade sail. I knew just by glancing at their complicated-looking pour-over device that they were drinking excellent coffee.

I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of pride and relief in registering that the most beautiful campsite of all was made by the only nonwhite people I’d seen, and Asian Americans to boot. By then, Hazel was making his way up to me, and I waved at him gleefully as I introduced him to the kids.

“Our parents are Asian, too!” one of them told us cheerfully.

“We’re Asian, dummy,” the other responded, rolling his eyes. “So obviously that means our parents are Asian, too.”

“I mean, not necessarily,” I said, trying to be helpful. “You could be adopted!”

“Yeah, we could be adopted,” the other said, blowing a raspberry at his friend. Hazel and I grinned conspiratorially as we hurried back to fill Pearl in on what we learned about the Asians, taking turns recounting the details.

 I’ve never built a campfire in my life.

Later, we all drank sake out of our tin cups as we watched the sun set pink over the bay at low tide — clam diggers worked their way through the glistening mud as the siblings told me stories about growing up together, their disastrous road trips, the pets they had loved. As dusk settled, we hurried back to make dinner, at which point my pleasant, dreamy mood was shattered as Salem heartlessly attempted to press me into building that fire — the one on which our comfort and dinner depended.

“Oh no, oh my god! Wei! You’re getting so upset!” he said, as soon as I hid my face with my hands. He pulled me into a hug.

“Wei,” Pearl said gently from the fire pit, using the same tone she had at the camping store to coax me out of my manic state, and I wiped my face on my sleeves and crept down next to her as she explained how to start with pine needles, leaning larger and larger sticks over the fire as it grew. “People like to say there’s a right way to do it, but there isn’t,” she said, swatting Hazel away as he tried to offer commentary. She leaned in to blow on the fire, and the embers lit up with her breath.

Soon the fire was crackling and the siblings jumped into cooking, enthusiastically clashing about what they wanted to eat and how best to make it. Hazel established himself as the gourmand, dressing a steak with rosemary and butter and showing me how to gauge its doneness by pressing on different parts of my fist. Pearl roasted a hot dog on a stick while Salem fussed over an aluminum packet of potatoes and mushrooms. As they cooked, they debated new ways to construct a s’more — wrapping the entire thing in foil to place on the grate, dumping the chocolate and marshmallow in a pan to approximate something like s’more fondue.

At that moment, there was no better hot dog in the entire world than the one dripping with butter and ashes in my hands.

Listening to the siblings bicker and tease each other about their different ways of cooking, eating, and being, I was encouraged to find my own way, too, to see my camping ignorance as an opportunity to do exactly as I felt. (I’d even discovered, by then, that, just a little hike away, there was a cabin of gloriously pristine bathroom stalls, for those of us with overactive vaginal imaginations.)

I ventured to throw a hot dog and a bun on the grate. When they were both black with char, Hazel doused them in butter for me. I hate it when people say that food tastes better when you’re camping, as if there is glory in deprivation, but at that moment, there was no better hot dog in the entire world than the one dripping with butter and ashes in my hands.

 Without a doubt, the best hot dog I’ve ever eaten  Maybe I’m a camping person after all.

The next day, Salem and I decided that we would camp one more night on our way home to Brooklyn. We stopped midway to have lunch with some friends, who graciously took our elaborate order, in advance, for what I like to call salad sandwiches — tomato, cucumber, sprouts, onion, avocado, cheddar, dill pickle, and mayonnaise on seven-grain bread. After picnicking and horsing around in a river all afternoon, the thought of setting up a tent again started to feel arduous.

“We could just drive straight home to Brooklyn,” Salem suggested, as I merged onto the freeway. I told him no — I was a camping person now, and that meant I needed to camp. Who even was I anymore, without the sun on my face and a patch of grass to curl up on?

We often talk about assimilation as if it were a one-way street, but it isn’t. It shouldn’t be.

We grew quiet, and I reflected on our past few days, on his family, on him. I thought back to earlier in the year, during some big fight, when I’d shouted at him to stop treating me like I was white, fed up with what I felt was his disinterest in my individual experience, while simultaneously seeing that I hadn’t exactly shared the reality of that experience freely, for fear that he would reject me like the camping people of my youth.

Until that fight, I had too often conflated belonging with acceptance. I thought that in order to be accepted, I needed to keep my nonwhite perspective from my white boyfriend and his white family. That I needed to face the wilderness unafraid to be taken seriously as a nature writer. That I needed to camp like “camping people” — like white people — in order to camp at all. But I grow more certain each day that my fixation with belonging only ever backfires. If I’m not honest about who I am, how can anyone figure out how to accept me in the first place?

Salem listened when I fussed at him about not being white, and I got a little braver every day about expressing the ways that I am different from him rather than the same. And now, a year into dating, his brother tags along when I feel moved to approach strangers at swing sets just because they are Asian, even if it makes him nervous. And his sister has identified how to tell when I’m so embarrassed I want to die, as well as the exact tone of voice that will calm me down. We often talk about assimilation as if it were a one-way street, but it isn’t. It shouldn’t be.

I glanced at Salem as he stared into his phone and struggled to remember what I thought of him when we first met. Now, when I look at his face I feel the collapse of distance, the familiarity of a kind of home that you can’t buy, or drive to, or set up with tent poles.

“Hey,” I said. He looked at me. “You were right. Let’s go back to Brooklyn.”

via Eater - All https://www.eater.com/21349842/summer-travel-camping-wei-tchou

Created August 19, 2020 at 09:26PM /huong sen View Google Doc Nhà hàng Hương Sen chuyên buffet hải sản cao cấp✅ Tổ chức tiệc cưới✅ Hội nghị, hội thảo✅ Tiệc lưu động✅ Sự kiện mang tầm cỡ quốc gia 52 Phố Miếu Đầm, Mễ Trì, Nam Từ Liêm, Hà Nội http://huongsen.vn/ 0904988999 http://huongsen.vn/to-chuc-tiec-hoi-nghi/ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xa6sRugRZk4MDSyctcqusGYBv1lXYkrF

[180abroad]

Day 186: Last Day in Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum and Sweets. Lots and lots of Sweets.)

Our week in Amsterdam had flown by, and today was our last chance to cross any items off our must-see list. The biggest line item was the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands' answer to the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in London. We also had a canal boat tour to cash in, as well as some more edible works of art to enjoy.

Our first stop of the day came at the recommendation of one of Jessica's friends, who had insisted that we absolutely had to try some Dutch poffertjes from a food cart at the Alberg Cuyp Street Market. A sort of fluffy miniature pancake, poffertjes can be popped out hot and fresh by the dozen thanks to a clever contraption that pours the batter into a specialized pan

We got them with sea salt and caramel sauce, and they were the creamiest, fluffiest, most delicious things we could remember tasting on the entire trip.

As we walked over from the street market to the Rijksmuseum, we stopped for coffee at an espresso bar that one reviewer claimed to be the best in Europe outside of Italy. It was just okay, at best.

The Rijksmuseum is beautiful and massive. It resembles a cathedral from the front, with its twin spires, tall arched windows, and engraved images---not of saints and martyrs, but of artists and scholars.

Inside, we ran yet again into our old friend Laocoön one last time. Note how in this depiction,  Laocoön's right arm is extended horizontally outward instead of bent back at the elbow. As we'd learned back in the Vatican archives, that means that this statue (or possibly the copy that it was a copy of) was made before 1906, when the original statue's missing right arm was finally discovered. Before then, most experts believed that Laocoön's arm had been extended in the way we see here. Given the aesthetic principles of Greek and Roman sculpture, it seemed obvious.

But Michelangelo had known better.

Four hundred years earlier, when tasked by the Vatican to reassemble the recently unearthed statue, Michelangelo could tell that the right arm was supposed to be bent. Just by looking at the musculature of the one-armed statue, he deduced that, 1) the original Greek sculptor was as much a master of human anatomy as he was himself, and 2) that the way the muscles in the sculpture's back were flexed meant that the model posing for the statue had to have had his arm bent back at the elbow. And he was right. It's like something out of Sherlock.

Bypassing the rest of the museum for now, we headed straight upstairs to the main event: the Gallery of Honor, a purpose-built grand hall exhibiting the best of the best of the Dutch Golden Age.

The museum's cathedralesque motif resumed at the top of the stairs. Light poured into the gallery's antechamber through stained glass windows venerating the great artists and thinkers of Western civilization.

The Rijksmuseum's Gallery of Honor is a brilliant idea that I think more museums should embrace. It consists of a long, vaulted corridor lined with alcoves dedicated to the greatest works of the greatest Dutch artists from the Golden Age. Even if you only had one hour to visit the museum, you could spend the entire hour here and leave contented that you made good use of your time.

The previous day, we'd been so impressed by the Mauritshuis in The Hague for its impressively manageable collection. In a way, the Gallery of Honor does an admirable job of creating the same effect in a much larger museum---it makes the unmanageable manageable.

Rather than rushing around trying to see all the most important stuff---our visit to the Louvre in a nutshell---the Rijksmuseum brings all the most important stuff to you in one easy room. Then, if you have more time, you can relax and explore the rest of the museum's fantastic collections at your leisure, free to guiltlessly explore whichever exhibits happen to tickle your curiosity.

But enough about design theory; let's get to the art.

One of our favorite artists featured in the room was Jan Steen. A natural comedian and storyteller among the Golden Age artists, Steen made paintings that were colorful, fun, and lowbrow with a snarky undercurrent of social commentary.

Many of Steen's paintings feature large families or groups of revelers, and the level of detail is amazing. His faces are brilliantly emotive, and every person exudes a sense of story. One of my favorites is Prince's Day, which shows a raucous tavern scene. There are over twenty characters in the picture, and every one of them feels fully alive and engaged with what's happening---even the barely visible couple whispering to each other in the background.

But the real punchline is a barely-there portrait of the prince hanging in the murky recesses of the ceiling. These people couldn't care less that they're supposedly celebrating the prince's birthday; they're just happy for any excuse to drink and be merry. And the primly dressed little girl looking straight out at you from the middle of the scene seems to know it, too.

It's no surprise that Jessica and I both loved the work of Van Ruisdael, the Golden Age's master landscape artist. I was particularly struck by his painting of The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede. It shows a picturesque windmill standing near a river. The nearby town is just discernible by the roofs of the local church and castle peeking up in the distance. Late afternoon sunlight beautifully illuminates the windmill at a dramatic angle, and at first the scene seems idyllic. Looking closer, however, you can see the clouds are becoming ominously dark, and the surface of the river is marked by a noticeable chop.

I may be overthinking it, but with the way the windmill dominates the scene while the castle and church fade into the background, it seems as though Ruisdael had something to say about the relative positions of industry, government, and religion in Golden Age Dutch society. Perhaps even about which way the winds were blowing, so to speak.

Another of the honored greats was Frans Hals, with his ability to create portraits that are remarkably heartwarming and instantly likeable.

And of course, there was Vermeer---the once-nearly-forgotten master of light and color whose slow and fastidious technique (along with his relatively early death) left him with remarkably few paintings to his name. As we'd learned the day before at the Mauritshuis, the Rijksmuseum has the largest collection of paintings by Vermeer in the world: four. And while the Mauritshuis has the iconic Girl With a Pearl Earring, the Rijksmuseum has some classics, too, including The Love Letter, The Milkmaid, and Woman Reading a Letter.

At least, usually. When we visited, however, Woman Reading a Letter was on loan to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Luckily, Jessica and I had already been there and seen that.

Another particularly interesting canvas came in the unlikely form of an angrily defecating swan. The life-size Threatened Swan was painted by Jan Asselijn as a straightforward nature scene, showing the drama of a swan defending its nest from a curious dog. But that's just the beginning of its story.

Over a hundred years later, simple nature paintings had gone out of style. People wanted art to be rich with symbolism---whether or not the artist actually intended it. The Threatened Swan was therefore "improved" by the addition of allegorical labels, effectively turning it into a glorified nationalist political cartoon. The swan's eggs were labelled "Holland," the dog was labelled "enemies of the state," and the swan was the Dutch government defending the people of Holland from their enemies.

Last but not least was Rembrandt, the big daddy of the Golden Age painters. Rembrandt was a master of pretty much every genre of painting, but his trademark was large-scale group portraits. It was a mark of pride during the Golden Age for professional organizations to commission group portraits of their members. And Rembrandt had a unique talent for turning what would normally have been a dull lineup of doctors or lawyers into a lively and interesting scene.

The ultimate room at the end of the Gallery is dedicated to Rembrandt's massive Night Watch. The room was designed specifically to showcase it, and the rest of the Gallery grew from there.

Today, at least, the painting is considered a spectacular masterpiece. But as soon as he finished it, Rembrandt’s group portrait commissions immediately dried up. Whether this was the result of dissatisfaction with the painting or an unfortunate coincidence caused by an economic downturn is a matter of speculation. In any case, this painting represents the high-water mark of Rembrandt's career.

Another funny story about The Night Watch is that the name is a total misnomer. The painting's actual name is the more accurate but less catchy Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. Due to the improper use of a dark varnish, the image became so dark that people mistook it for a night scene.

It was only in the 1940s that the varnish was finally removed to reveal the truth. And just over a month after we saw it, the Rijksmuseum began a new restoration project that will hopefully reveal even more lost details. The painting is still on display, though---it is being worked on in public, behind a glass wall that has taken over the center of the room. You can even livestream it on the Rijksmuseum's website.

Having finished our tour of the Gallery of Honor, we were free to wander the rest of the museum to see what we could see.

A nearby room on the same floor was dedicated to Dutch naval art and history. Above the door hangs a trophy that we found as hilarious as it was interesting. For everyone else, it will take a bit of explaining.

Thanks to our travels in the UK, Jessica and I were able to immediately recognize the emblem on this ship’s stern carving as the British royal crest. So, what was a piece of a royal British ship doing hanging in a Dutch museum? The bulk of the room is dedicated to explaining the story.

 In a daring raid, Dutch captain Michiel de Ruyter sailed his fleet up the English River Medway and captured over a dozen English warships, including the English flagship HMS Royal Charles. He towed the Royal Charles back to Amsterdam, where it was put on display as a tourist attraction---to the great annoyance of its namesake King Charles II of England.

The ship was eventually broken up for scrap, and this stern piece was kept as a trophy of the catastrophic embarrassment they had wrought upon the British navy.

That was what Jessica and I found so hilarious.

De Ruyter became a national hero in the Netherlands, and even King Louis XIV of France---with whom the Dutch were not on particularly good terms---honored De Ruyter just for sticking it to the English.

Another nearby room was filled with landscape paintings, including one that Jessica and I recognized instantly for its style as the work of our favorite artistic discovery of the trip: Claude Lorrain. A nearby plaque explained that, much like Claude, many of the great Dutch landscape artists honed their skills while studying abroad in Rome.

We also saw some truly insane dollhouses. Apparently, it was popular among a certain class of wealthy Dutch merchants to show off buy commissioning absurdly opulent dollhouses. The houses were incredibly detailed, with miniature recreations of real paintings on the walls. One of these dollhouses on display was as tall as a person and cost more than an actual house in its day.

And of course, once a merchant had spent a considerable fortune on completing their dollhouse, it was only natural for them to then commission an artist to do a painting of it.

One of the larger rooms was dedicated to the famous ceramic pottery made in the Dutch city of Delft.

We learned that the tremendous success of "Delft Blue" pottery industry is partly due to Queen Mary II of England, wife of William of Orange. Mary loved the blue-and-white ceramics that the Dutch were importing from China and Japan. Naturally, this started a craze among well-to-do Dutch and English women who wanted to copy her style. There were only so many imported ceramics to go around, however, so it was only a matter of time before a group of Dutch artisans cracked the secret and began making their own domestic versions.

Delft Blue pottery ended up becoming so renowned that it was even exported back to China and Japan.

There's even an artistic offshoot dedicated to creating illustrated Delft Blue tiles as an alternative to canvas paintings.

Downstairs, we saw some impressive Post-Impressionist paintings, including self-portraits by Van Gogh and his friend Emile Bernard.

Before leaving the museum, we made sure to see one last highlight of the museum---a massive floor-to-ceiling painting by Jan Willem Pieneman of the victorious Dutch and British forces after the battle of Waterloo. The painting was commissioned by the Duke of Wellington to celebrate his victory, and he can be seen in the center of the painting, illuminated with a shaft of light as if by God. But the Dutch King William I saw the painting and liked it so much that it bought it out from under Wellington and gave it to his son Prince William II. The prince is also featured in the painting, in the lower left corner, being carried off the battlefield on a stretcher.

After leaving the museum, we took another stroll through Vondelpark, which we'd visited before after seeing the Van Gogh Museum. It's a big park, but trees and canals do a nice job of dividing it into cozy-feeling sections where you can almost feel alone with nature.

It was beautiful and serene, except for one mildly horrifying sight we came upon when we had to cross under an overpass.

Our next goal of the day was to find some oliebol, a sort of Dutch doughnut hole that Nic was determined to try. We found a highly rated bakery, but we were sadly informed that oliebols are only really made around Christmas. So instead, we made do with some raspberry-redcurrant tarts that were to die for.

(Don’t ask about the potato…)

The tarts had an unusually thick, cookie-like crust. Jessica tried to wheedle the secret out of the man behind the counter, but he either didn’t know or just played dumb.

With nothing better left to do, it was finally time to cash in the canal boat tour vouchers that we'd gotten in a package deal with our Van Gogh Museum tickets and the windmill countryside tour. It's no less touristy than any of the big City Sightseeing bus tours, but we still had fun and learned a bit.

We learned that the three U-shaped canals that belt the center of Amsterdam were dug during the Golden Age, when Amsterdam’s population quadrupled in size and necessitated a major city expansion. The inner ring was for royals and nobility, the middle ring was for wealthy merchants, and the outer ring was for the working class and warehouses.

Today, even the outer ring is such valuable property that only things like banks and high-end boutiques can afford it.

As much as any of the other amazing sights, we were also impressed by how daringly close the drivers of Amsterdam park their cars to the edge of canals.

We also learned the story behind Amsterdam’s city crest---a red shield with a vertical black bar and three white X's (more formally known as crosses of St. Andrew). The red shield symbolizes the city, the black line symbolizes the Amstel river that runs through the city, and the three crosses of St. Andrew represent divine protection from fires, floods, and plagues.

The use of red and black to represent the city and the river seemed odd at first, but as we talked about it after the cruise, we soon realized that we were walking on red brick streets and looking out at a shimmering river that looked like glinting obsidian in the sunlight.

We decided to end the day with a meal at Europe’s oldest floating Chinese restaurant. Another thing we'd learned on the canal tour was that Amsterdam has the oldest Chinatown in continental Europe. (Jessica and I had already learned that Liverpool has the oldest Chinatown in all of Europe.)

Well, we almost ended the day there.

Nicolas wouldn’t be satisfied with our stay in Amsterdam until we'd had some of the churros we’d seen in bakeries and chip shops around town all week.

Venturing back into the streets, we found a hole-in-the-wall ice cream joint near the Red Light District called Sweetness. We ducked inside and soon found ourselves ordering something called the Red Light Special, which looked like a sort of churro sundae in the pictures on the overhead menu.

It wasn’t until the server turned out the lights and shouted “Are you ready?!” that we began to wonder whether we had ordered something we hadn’t intended to.

It was a churro and ice cream extravaganza, complete with red sparklers and a powdered-sugar fireball.

As ridiculous as it was, it was also delicious and just the right size for the three of us.

With our stomachs full of sweets, it was finally time for us to head home and start packing up. Tomorrow we would be flying to Iceland for a 48-hour cherry to cap off our six-month adventure. It’s been an amazing ride, and it’s hard to believe it’s already almost over.

[bikechatter]

Vera got stuff done: Lessons in leadership for a changing Portland

1972 campaign flyer for State Representative District 8, Vera Katz’s first elected position. (Portland State University Library Special Collections)

Sarah Iannarone is the associate director of First Stop Portland and a former candidate for Portland Mayor. She lives in east Portland.

Former Portland Mayor Vera Katz died last week at age 84. Three time Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives who went on to serve three terms as Portland Mayor, Katz’s reach was extensive. Part legacy leaver, part urban legend, Katz’s persona looms as large in Portland’s civic imagination as her accomplishments.

As someone born the year Katz was first elected and somewhat removed from state and local politics during her tenure, I’m not suited to eulogize her. Rather, I offer a few lessons gleaned from her leadership and thoughts how we might apply them today.

When I arrived in Portland in 1998 — one of those twenty-somethings allegedly looking to retire — Katz was just beginning her second term as Portland mayor. I’d rented a one-bedroom basement apartment in the Historic Alphabet District for $500 (remember those?) and my living room windows looked directly onto the front stoop of Katz’s 1890 Victorian. At the crack of dawn on workdays (which included many Saturdays and even some Sundays), her distinctive voice would ring across the yard with a warm greeting to her driver followed by a quickly barked roadmap of the morning’s activities. She wouldn’t get home until usually well after dark. I didn’t know then why my neighbor with the New York accent had no time for small talk on that stoop; I knew only that she seemed important and powerful, a bit of workaholic even, and that she never drove herself anywhere.

Lessons from Vera

Urbanism is a practice not a vision.

Leadership requires chutzpah.

Lead like a mother.

Ten years later, I found myself her neighbor again. This time, I knew who she was. Having wrapped up her last term as Portland Mayor, Katz occupied an office part-time at Portland State University as a Visiting Fellow in the Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies alongside College of Urban & Public Affairs Dean Nohad Toulan. I was just beginning my tenure down the hall from her there with the First Stop Portland program, where I’d been assigned the task of assembling Portland’s sustainability story and building a “green brain trust” of local experts to share their firsthand experiences with policymakers from around the globe. A good chunk of my work entailed translating step-by-step how Katz & Co. had transformed Portland from a parochial backwater into a sustainability mecca now famous for its climate action planning, downtown redevelopment, investments in transit and cycling, and culture of citizen engagement. In the decade since, hundreds of mayors and their emissaries have traveled from around the world to study Portland as a “model city.”

Katz oversaw Portland through the 1990s and into the aughts, a period of sustained growth and prosperity. She was instrumental in many landmark projects, notably revitalizing the Pearl and South Waterfront districts and connecting them by streetcar and aerial tram. She oversaw bicycling and walking investments including Portland’s “Yellow Bike” share program and construction of her eponymous Eastbank Esplanade. Even the new Tilikum Crossing, coming online long after her time, bears her imprint. By one project designer’s account, original designs had the towers much taller than built: it was Katz who’d insisted on scaling them down lest our moderately-scaled city risk “ostentation.”

“For better or worse, Katz was an orthodox urbanist who believed that good design was a pathway to livability for the average Portlander.”

For better or worse, Katz was an orthodox urbanist who believed that good design was a pathway to livability for the average Portlander.

Which brings us to Lesson #1: Urbanism is a practice not a vision. People talk about how visionary Katz was but I’d argue her ideas about what would make Portland livable were informed less by Utopian ideals of the great city and more by her experiences growing up on the streets of Brooklyn. Like Jane Jacobs, who also spent many formative years in mid-century NYC, Katz was intimately familiar with dense, walkable neighborhoods connected by mass transit and understood the dynamics by which human-scale design fostered community. Rather than maintaining some fixed image of what Portland might look like twenty years down the road, it’s likely Katz had internalized the relationship between urban form and urban life and the importance of infrastructure to connect them. It was from a practical position then, not an idealistic one, that she midwifed Portland’s first high-density urban neighborhoods to accommodate the demographic shifts she astutely predicted would shape the city’s future. Katz once proposed capping of I-405 for development and was vocally opposed to urban freeway expansion.

If Katz were mayor today, she’d likely talk less about building lanes on I-5 at the Rose Quarter than about building high-density housing in inner eastside neighborhoods from OMSI to Albina, connected by the Esplanade and streetcar. Katz knew quality of life in a city was directly related to the quality of its neighborhoods.

At a celebration of life this week for Doug Macy, a pioneering designer who was also influential in shaping Portland, one of his eulogizers shared that he was fond of Goethe’s, “Dream no small dreams for they stir not hearts of men.” Even if Katz wasn’t familiar with this quote, she certainly lived it, which leads us to Lesson #2: Leadership requires chutzpah. When people talk about Katz’s style, they describe her moxie, brazenness, and assertiveness.

“Collaboration is where Katz’s leadership really shines… she cared less about asserting ‘power over’ and more about building ‘power to.’

On the week of her passing, we repeatedly saw words like “force of nature” “indomitable” “tenacious” “tireless” and “bold.” A long-time champion of gay and women’s rights, Katz’s passionate activism was the precursor to her entering politics, according to her son, Jesse. As legislator and then mayor, Katz’s chutzpah meant she swung for the fences — understanding all too well that thinking big and taking risks sometimes meant striking out. Katz suffered losses — such as failing to bring Major League Baseball to Portland or reforming the commission form of government — but she was rarely defeated. Given the current pace of Portland’s growth and increasing uncertainty from D.C., Portland’s leaders at all levels would be well served to emulate Katz’s chutzpah — taking more risks, failing with grace, and committing to big, bold ideas rather than equivocating in the name of consensus building.

Speaking of bringing people together to get things done, collaboration is where Katz’s leadership really shines. I read several times last week that Katz was intentional about the “feminization” of her politics — she cared less about asserting ‘power over’ and more about building ‘power to.’ It’s not coincidental that Portland’s last multiple-term and arguably “last successful” mayor approached the job less as a manager or executive than as an activist and mother. Which points us directly toward Lesson #3: Lead like a mother.

There’s been a lot of talk among Portland’s leadership lately about cross-sector and intergovernmental collaboration to address some of Portland’s more pressing problems, including our housing crisis. Make no mistake, Katz was masterful at creating effective partnerships. But Katz knew, as all mothers do, that consensus can be overrated — ask anyone who’s thrown a toddler birthday party how much consensus matters to a successful outcome. Mothers also know that conflict is a part of daily life; rather than working to avoid it, mothers spend their time filtering it, shaping it, and directing it to get everyone where they need to go. Whether instinctual or learned (likely a combination of both) Katz recognized that leadership doesn’t end once everyone’s around the table and she was rarely preoccupied with arriving at consensus. She demonstrated that for politicians to lead effectively, they needed stir emotion in their community, to shape the collective impulse that would move them in the same direction toward a common goal. Good leadership, Katz taught us, inspires bold vision; it doesn’t stem from it.

Which brings us to that inevitable paradox wherein our successes create new challenges. Katz’s greatest contributions to our city, the investments in compact, walkable neighborhoods connected by transit that she championed to improve the lives of average Portlanders, have ultimately priced many of them out. The 400 square-foot apartment I once occupied on NW Johnson now rents for $1500 a month; that Victorian next door would sell for around $1.3 million. Many Katz fans probably bristled as the Washington Post assigned her responsibility for turning “Portland into a hipster haven” — feeling it was callously ‘too soon’ but also knowing, to some extent, that it’s true. Furthermore, Katz’s brand of downtown-centric urbanism meant that while livability (and property values) increased for many Portlanders, those outside the tidy grid of the central city were largely left out of the equation. Despite adding significant housing units in her time, no one benefitted on Katz’s watch as much as real estate developers, who experienced a windfall from the global forces transforming urban industrial space for the emerging knowledge economy alongside a pro-growth mayor with a proclivity for PPPs (public-private partnerships). One East Portlander recalled Katz cutting budgets to services in his neighborhood while downtown was redeveloped under intense public subsidy: “It was the first time I witnessed wealth extraction from the working class to the wealthy.”

Sarah Iannarone.

Today, the everyday urbanism Katz tirelessly championed on behalf of her beloved Portland has worked well for some residents, but has become a tool of increasing inequity and exclusion for many others.

While Katz is spoken of today with respect verging on reverence, it’s important to remember that she was very much a product of her times. The last mayor to govern Portland prior to the internet era, her decisive yet often contentious action escaped to some extent the incessant scrutiny and popular commentary today’s elected officials face. The increasing inequity, displacement, privatization, and thinning of the social safety net that gained a toehold on Katz’s watch has intensified with every mayor since and is bifurcating cities worldwide, including Katz’s hometown of Brooklyn, which finds itself reeling from gentrification of a magnitude that Portlanders can barely imagine.

These prevailing patterns of urban development are global; no cities are immune. So how can these place-based lessons in leadership from the Katz era remain relevant in a rapidly globalizing Portland? As our city, like so many others, finds itself increasingly divided, we must shift Katz’s focus on quality of life away from the project of urban development toward tackling injustice in our city. We must apply an equity lens relentlessly to Katz’s everyday urbanism, recentering our neighborhood investments away from urban design and toward human rights. We must channel Katz’s chutzpah and courage as we make hard, sometimes unpopular decisions around redistribution of wealth and power in our city and region. Finally, we must continue her legacy of feminizing our local politics, dismantling oppressive power structures and innovating diverse and inclusive institutions to help us adapt sustainably and prosperously for our common future.

— Sarah Iannaorone, @SarahforPDX

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[itsworn]

1975 Duster: A Real Deal 10-Second All-Motor Street Car!

We’ve all been there. You spot a nice looking car at a cruise night and decide to dive in for a deeper look. As you are looking at the car you strike up a conversation and ask the guy if he has ever raced the car and if he has, what it runs. Then the dreaded response comes back. “It’ll run 10s in the quarter!” The safest response in this situation is to nod you head and move along, otherwise it’s just going to get weirder. We’ll never understand why people take this line of thinking and the good news is that there are some people out there whose word you can trust and the owner of this 1975 Plymouth Duster, George Kavounis, is one of them. When he tells you that the big-block—powered A-Body runs 10s, you can believe him!

The Chrysler A-Body platform was one of the company’s most successful, and in some respects, longest lasting. The cars were also very diverse in terms of image and performance. From the high-winding, high-performance small-block cars of the early 1970s to the economy themed models of the later part of the decade, the A-Body entries were certainly an effort to appeal to the different interests and needs of customers at the time. For guys like George Kavounis, they are more than that because they represent a vessel to invest time, effort, and finances into personalizing and modifying.

Back in 1970, George had the Mopar bug bad and with the help of his dad, bought a 1970 Plum Crazy Duster with a 340. Being into horsepower and drag racing, George built the car into a Super Stock/I Automatic runner and had great fun with the car until 1975 when he sold it. “I had been into Mopars all through my childhood,” George said. “My dad was a Chrysler guy and while he never had muscle cars, I took to them. I would read every magazine I could find and when the 1968 Hemi Darts and Barracudas came out I was just head-over-heels for them. I bought the Duster and drove it on the street while racing it until I got out of high school and with a friend set the car up to go Super Stock racing. We did that for two years until the index we were racing on got bombed pretty hard by John Lingenfelter and then I sold the car.”

Just because he was out of the racecar game didn’t mean his love for cars or Mopars had gone away. The first time he laid eyes on the ’75 you see here, it brought him right back to the days of excitement and fun he had with his ’70, and it had the same tough look to boot. “I met Allen Hall at a cruise night and we just started talking and became friends,” George said. “I would see him at the track and I worked with him on the car. I liked the car because I have always been a Mopar guy and Allen’s car was really well kept. When Allen’s health started to get a bit rocky he moved to Florida and before he left I told him that if he ever wanted to sell, I had to be the first call.” Amazingly, after not hearing from Allen for two years, the phone rang. “He told me that this was my call and my shot to buy the car,” George said. “I asked for a couple of days to get the money together and he said OK. I bought the car and he delivered it to me.”

When George got the car, it was a dedicated race car and he wanted to put the thing back on the street. “I knew that there were some things I needed to do in order to get the car back to a point where I could drive it on the road,” George said. “When I got it the car ran on race gas only. I took off the steel heads, changed the intake and carb, and generally went through the engine to make it a really healthy but driveable piece.” A 446ci RB engine that makes torque like a tug boat and still has manners good enough that it does not need race gas to survive is the end result. Using a 1976 model year 440ci block as the foundation, C&C Motorsports took it from there. The build plan involved a stock crank and stock rods with a .030-overbore to make sure everything was round and true. TRW forged pistons were used to get the compression ratio to a healthy 11.0:1, and the camshaft was sourced from Ray Barton who followed up with a mild, street friendly .590-inch lift, 284/296 duration (at .050) bumpstick. The theme of simplicity continues to the upper end of the engine with a set of Hensley Racing ported and polished Edlebrock Performer cylinder heads. Those heads use a 2.14-inch intake valve and a 1.81-inch exhaust. An Edelbrock Victor intake manifold sits atop those heads and a 1,000cfm double-pumper Quick Fuel 4150 carb feeds the whole beast.

With an engine built to make loads of torque and lots of usable power, the rest of the drivetrain has to match it to make the car both happy on the street and a stormer on the strip. The transmission is an ATI Performance built 727 equipped with a manual valvebody and fronted by an 8-inch diameter torque converter with a stall speed of 3,500 rpm. The converter makes or breaks this combo on the street, and with a 3,500 stall speed, it is loose enough to keep the engine happy but not crazy for street operation. Rearend gears are 4.57 ratio Mosers and while you are probably thinking that those cannot be street driven for any time, remember that this car wears a rear tire that is 31 inches tall.

When George said he built the car to drive it (obviously not cross-country but on the street) he meant it. “I cannot stand to see the car sit. I love driving it. I will get it out all through the year. For instance, if there is a warm day in the winter and I can take the car around town, to the hardware store or whatever, I’ll do it. I will take the car on decent trips to cruise nights and events. I don’t like to buzz the motor too badly so if I am on the highway I stick to the right lane and let traffic by me. I really love driving the car.” We love this guy!

The stance of this car is pretty great. There are lots of times where cars using a ladder-bar style rear suspension sit higher than normal to clear larger rear tires, but in the case of George’s Duster, that’s not a problem. Tucking just a touch of front tire and a healthy chunk of the tall and fat rears, it maintains a level appearance until George hammers the gas on the starting line and those big tires bite the track. You can see how well the suspension works in the launch photos where the front of the car is heading up and the rear tires are wrapped up and working hard!

Perhaps the best part of this whole story is the fact that George has spent a load of time working on the car with his sons Nick and Drew. That’s the good stuff. This car that brought Allen so much pleasure when he owned it has landed into the hands of a man who loved it as much as the previous owner did, and has even been able to transfer that experience and passion to his kids. Like we said, this car and George Kavounis are the real deal!

While loads of other cars got big and fat during the 1970s, the Plymouth Duster did not suffer the same fate. Those A-Body lines kept nice and tight when the rest of Detroit was going to flab.

In today’s world it seems like everyone wants to overcomplicate things and that’s why this 446ci big-block is a breath of fresh air. With 11.0:1 compression, a Barton-spec’d camshaft that does not kill springs, and torque for days, it rockets the Duster to 10-second elapsed times with ease. Winning!

A couple of buckets, a nicely padded dash, and a killer Winters shifter make this the office that Geoge Kavonis attacks the drag strip from. Functional and tasteful, we’re fans of its business-like environment.

Here’s a great look at the Duster going to work off the starting line. Note the weight transfer onto the sticky Mickey Thompson rear tires and the fact that this thing is a hair away from yanking those front tires. The car works.

What really spins our crank about this particular 1975 Plymouth Duster is the stance. Ladder-bar cars can have that old-school, high-riding stance but this one doesn’t, and it works great off the line. The wheel tubs allow the car to sit down and take the 4×4 look out of the equation.

While 1983 was not the greatest year for Mopar performance, this Duster’s color was from that year’s palette. Called Aqua Pearl, we dig its classy look in the sun. Oh, and how nice are the lines on this car from this angle?!

Non-car people have no idea what this is but we consider it the Mona Lisa of high performance. A mighty Dana 60, ladder bars, a Moser spool, and 4.57 gearset along with those AFCO coilovers and steam roller Hoosiers mean business and quick 60-foot times.

While we all like to talk about horsepower, it is really torque that gets a 3,700-lb car moving off the starting line. With an Old Testament thick stack of 10-second time slips powered by 446 cubes, a stock crank, and stock rods, George knows all about it. Is there anything better than a car you know you can take to the strip and have fun with without worry?

FAST FACTS

1975 Plymouth Duster George Kavounis; Centreville, Virginia

ENGINE Type: Chrysler RB-series big-block wedge V8 Bore x stroke: 4.35 (bore) x 3.75 (stroke), 446ci Block: 1976 Chrysler iron factory Rotating assembly: stock factory forged crank, TRW forged pistons, stock connecting rods Compression ratio: 11.0:1 Cylinder heads: Edelbrock Performer cylinder heads ported and polished by Hensley Camshaft: .590-inch lift, 284/286 degrees duration at 0.050 Valvetrain: 2.14-/1.81-inch valves, Cloyed double-roller timing chain, Crane 1.6-ratio roller rockers, Crane pushrods, Crane valve springs good to .750-inch lift. Induction: Edelbrock Victor intake manifold, Quick Fuel 4150 series 1,000cfm carb Fuel system: trunk-mounted fuel cell, Holley electric fuel pump Exhaust: CPPA Headers with 3.5-inch exhaust to the rear axle

Ignition: MSD crank trigger, MSD 7AL ignition box, timing locked at 30 degrees Oiling system: Milodon 7-quart oil pan with Milodon wet-sump oil pump Cooling: BeCool aluminum radiator with twin Spal electric fans, CSR electric water pump Fuel: Holley black electric fuel pump Engine built by: C&C in Manassas, Virginia Best e.t.: 10.73 at 124 mph Weight: 3,750 lbs

DRIVETRAIN Transmission: 1971 vintage RB-spec 727 manual valve body built by ATI Performance, 8-inch torque converter with 3,500-rpm stall speed Driveshaft: fabricated by National Drivetrain Rearend: Dana 60 with Moser spool and 4.57 gears

CHASSIS Front suspension: aftermarket upper and lower control arms, torsions bars, 90/10 drag shocks, sway bar delete Rear suspension: ladder bars with AFCO coilover shocks Steering: rebuilt stock Brakes: stock disc/drum combo Chassis: frame connectors and NHRA-legal roll cage installed by owner

PAINT & INTERIOR Color: 1983 Chrysler Aqua Pearl paint with silver peal bottom strip Painter: Papo’s body shop; Annedale, Virginia Interior: JAZ bucket seats, dash pad done by Ernie’s Upholstery, Manassas, VA, AutoMeter gauges, Grant steering wheel, custom carpet

WHEELS & TIRES Wheels: Bogart 15×4 (front), 15×14 (rear) Tires: Mickey Thompson 26×7.5×15 (front), Hoosier 31×16.5×15 (rear)

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[unifiedsocialblog]

Unlocking The Mysteries Of PR With Janet Murray – Blogcentric #82

Unlocking The Mysteries Of PR With Janet Murray

What is PR? How can we use our blogs and social media to get us PR? How do you pitch ideas to journalists?

PR is one of those terms that can seem mysterious and weird to those of us who are used to marketing our businesses online. It seems big, alien and intimidating. The idea of talking to journalists is often a scary one.

Janet Murray is a PR expert who simplifies the whole thing. I’ve been reading her book ‘Your Press Release Is Breaking My Heart’ and it’s wonderful. I feel like I know exactly what I should be doing now.

And because Janet makes it sound so easy I asked her to join me on the podcast and share some of her pearls of wisdom. I learned loads and I’m sure you will too.

Listen to the full Interview with PR expert Janet Murray:

Highlights

Janet is a PR expert who’s never worked in PR. Her background is in journalism she’s been writing for national newspapers for the last 16 years. She’s also made lots of appearances on radio and TV.

Early in her career, she noticed that she was getting terrible pitches and press releases from people. Some of these were being sent by PR agencies. Small business owners were paying PR companies to send them.

Janet decided she could help. She started running masterclasses. She’d get people from PR companies and large organisations to come along and teach them how to pitch to journalists.

These masterclasses turned into bigger conferences. She was also doing consultancy work. That’s when she started her blog, answering the questions her customers had, in the hope of getting more consultancy contracts.

She found she liked the content marketing and helping small business owners so she pivoted her business to work more with them.

Her job is to help small businesses owners to tell their stories in the media.

There’s a membership community A book (affiliate link) A podcast A blog

Is it better to do PR yourself than hire a PR agency?

There’s a lot of value in doing it yourself to start with. As a small business owner, the first step is to get your head around what PR actually means.

When you do it yourself to start off with, you understand what’s involved. Who you want to get in front of and why. This helps you make a more qualified decision about outsourcing.

The other thing is many journalists don’t like doing business with PR companies. They’d much rather be talking to you.

What is PR?

The first thing I noticed when I started working with small business owners was that they were trying to get into the national newspapers but they weren’t actually creating regular content on their own sites. They weren’t blogging, they weren’t using email marketing. This meant that the impact of any press they got was minimised.

That’s why I say that PR is anything you are doing to promote your business to generate leads and sales.

That’s generally four things:

Creating content on your website

Email marketing

Social media

Press

The bit I specialise in is dealing with journalists.

How can I take a really interesting piece of content I have and pitch it to a journalist?

The first thing to say it not to start with the content you are already creating.

Start with the publications you want to get featured in. Don’t start with the story that you want to tell. The story that most business owners want to tell is ‘My business is amazing’. The bottom line is that journalists just aren’t interested in that kind of thing.

Each editor for a publication will have an audience and a fixed idea of the type of content they want to run for that audience.

Ask yourself what you want to get out of the press coverage you get. It will usually come back to more sales. Then you need to ask, who do I need to get in front of to make this happen? What do these people read, watch and listen to? It’s these publications you should be aiming for.

“It’s all very well to show your mum you are featured in Marie Claire but it might not have any impact on your business”

In the beginning there are some simple things you can do to get press coverage that don’t involve pitching to journalists.

1. Follow the #journorequests hashtag of Twitter

This is journalists looking for help with stories.

Sometimes with these you need to think creatively. It may be hard to relate it directly to your business but think of it like a relationship you are building with a journalist. If you help them out with this story when you do have a story to share you’ve kicked the door open.

2. Sign up to media inquiry services

These send you emails with requests from journalists looking for help with stories.

Here are a few:

ResponseSource

Gorkana

Journolink

Acemedia

Pressloft

Do you have to be a journalist to put a request out on those channels or can you do it as a blogger?

Yes, you can use them as a blogger. Sometimes the people who subscribe to them complain a bit that they get too many requests from bloggers. If you are doing that you need to show the values of your blog, so share any stats you’ve got about how many people visit your website etc.

How would you define an awful pitch?

It seems like an obvious thing but most people don’t’ read the publication that they’re pitching to. And I don’t just mean read.

I get my clients to do a ‘flat plan’. I get them to dissect the publication and write down what they see on every single page. When you do that you start to see patterns. You start to see things like ‘they have an interview with a business owner every Friday on the back page’. You’ll start to see opportunities.

The second thing is the email subject header. That is really important. I did a couple of weeks cover at the Guardian recently and I just got so many emails. I couldn’t open them all. So you look at the subject line and make a decision about whether you want to open it.

A common mistake I see is people trying to be mysterious. Label up your email so start it with ‘Story idea’ or ‘Pitch’ and then be very clear about what is in the email.

For example, if you were having a surfing fashion event you may be tempted to write a clever headline like ‘local business surfing the wave of fashion’ a busy journalist would have no idea what you were talking about.

Instead be clear so something like ‘local shop has surfing fashion show’ would work better.

Get your story into the first line of the email. Lots of people will start with three of four paragraphs about themselves. Remember the journalist isn’t interested in you, they’re interested in the story and if it’s right for their audience.

Don’t bother with a press release unless you have an amazing story that you think all the press will be interested in. A short email is absolutely fine.

What makes a good story?

I recommend to people that they put their story to the Facebook test. Try sharing your stories on your personal Facebook page first, what sort of reaction does it get? This can be the sign of whether a story idea is good or not.

Sometimes it’s the interest stories, the stories around the edge of your business that will spark the best reactions and the best stories.

Here’s Janet’s article about wearing the same clothes every day that sparked conversation in my Facebook group.

I’ve got a handout that I get my clients to work through. It’s a Venn diagram. In the middle, it’s got your business and round the edge of it, it’s got all kinds of things that intersect with your business, things like relationships, family, friends, work.

I’ve had coverage about the ‘she shed’ that I work from in the back of my garden, about miscarriage. Look for the stories that you might chat to your friends about. I appreciate that can be a bit uncomfortable that’s why I suggest starting with the small stuff, building relationships with journalists and then move on to this stuff.

Do you have a system for drawing the line about how personal you get and how much you reveal?

It all depends on what is comfortable for you. With the miscarriage stuff, I’ve done a few pieces. I feel like in sharing that content I’m helping other people.

If you are just doing it for the press that’s when you are going to make mistakes. If you’re helping other people you are doing OK. If you do get any flack you can normally handle it.

Is there something that we should be doing to make our blogs and our websites more PR friendly?

It’s less about your website and more about Twitter and your social media profiles. Journalists are actively looking on Twitter for people like you and me to talk to and they’re looking for experts.

Taking Boris as an example. Boris who owns an interior design shop selling couches, chairs, rugs etc.

If there is a story doing the rounds about say Princess Kate spending a lot on interior design. Everyone is talking about interior design all of a sudden. Journalists will be active on Twitter looking for people to talk to for that story.

Have your Twitter profile optimised so it’s very clear what you do. Make sure you’re regularly sharing content on that topic so there’s no question that you are an expert and also having a phone number on there so they can get hold of you at any hour of the day or night.

If the journalist or researcher is wanting to book someone for radio or TV then ideally they want to see a bit of film of you talking to check you’re alright.

I see a lot of small business owners wasting a lot of time and money on press packs. All you need is a Dropbox with some high-res images in and a couple of biographies.

Find Janet online:

Website: janetmurray.co.uk

Twitter: @jan_murray

Instagram: @janmurrayuk

Facebook group: Soulful PR Facebook Community

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  Unlocking The Mysteries Of PR With Janet Murray

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