#anyways there's my tangent for the night about why I need a better social life and maybe a bit of therapy too

[my-beloved-lakes]

I see a lot of people I knew from school posting pictures on their social medias with all their friends doing various fun things together. Meanwhile, I'm sitting at home wishing I could take a group photo with all my Tumblr mutuals to post so I can brag about having the best friends.

[toongrrl-blog]

Not (Nawt!) Another Benvi Playlist

Awwwwww, say I wonder how this would play in 1963? 1973? 1983? 1993? 2003? Maybe telegrams with the earlier years, I dunno. Did they have internships back when my parents were kids? I know they had Model UN, I knew that from Mad Men and I don't know about Sally Draper's place on the social totem pole in school but she's cool so Model UN wasn't social suicide then again her county was really Republican and her stepdad didn't like real UN.......

Anyway with this tangent, listen to some good songs kids!

"Silhouttes (On the Shade)" The Rays (Herman's Hermits and Cliff Richard and The Ronettes did good covers, this needs to be covered, hey someone contemporary cover this song)

Rushed down to your house with wings

On my feet

Loved you like I never loved

You my sweet

Vowed that you and I would be

Two silhouettes on the shade

All of our days

Two silhouettes on the sha-ade

Silhouettes (silhouettes)

2. "You Really Got A Hold On Me" The Miracles (The Beatles also covered this song)

I don't like you, but I love you

Seems that I'm always thinking of you

Oh, oh, oh

You treat me badly, I love you madly

You've really got a hold on me (You've really got a hold on me)

3. "How Deep Is Your Love" Bee Gees

And you may not think I care for you

When you know down inside that I really do

And it's me you need to show

How deep is your love?

4. "He's Sure the Boy I Love" The Crystals

When he holds me tight

Everything's right

Crazy as it seems

I'm his, whatever he is

And I forget all of my dreams

5. "My Rose" Luca and Emma Castellino (suggested by @fishyyyyy99)

And maybe I didn't make myself clear

Or maybe you pretend, so you wouldn't hurt me (so you wouldn't hurt me)

It's probably better like this

But baby, you're pretty damn hard to forget

6. "Tomorrow is Another Day" Shelby Flint

Tomorrow is another day

How I hope you'll always stay

7. "Back to Heaven" Later.

'Cause if you don't atract my lady right

She's gonna send me back to life

You never know what's good or bad

8. "Unchained Melody" Todd Duncan, the Righteous Brothers, actually been covered several times

Woah, my love, my darling

I've hungered for your touch

A long, lonely time

And time goes by so slowly

And time can do so much

Are you still mine?

I need your love

9. "You've Made Me So Very Happy" Brenda Holloway (famously covered by Blood, Sweat, and Tears)

I love you so much you see

You're even in my dreams

I can hear

Baby, I can hear you calling me

I'm so in love with you

All I ever want to do is

Thank you baby

Thank you baby

10. "It Might As Well Rain Until September" Carole King (then covered by Bobby Vee)

The weather here has been as nice as it can be

Although it doesn't really matter much to me

For all the fun I'll have while you're so far away

It might as well rain until September

11. "Everything Has Changed" Best Coast

I used to crawl

All the way back home

I used to cry myself to sleep

Reading all the names they called me

Used to say that I was lazy

A lazy, crazy baby

Did they think

That maybe I was in on it?

Did they think?

No, of course they didn't

12. "The Way You Love Me" Faith Hill

There's nowhere else I'd rather be

Oooh, to feel the way I, feel with your arms around me

I only wish that you could see, the way you love me

The way you love me

13. "It's Your Love" Tim McGraw and Faith Hill

Oh, it's a beautiful thing

Don't think I can keep it all in (oh oh)

And if you ask me why I've changed

All I gotta do is say your sweet name

It's your love

It just does something to me

It sends a shock right through me

I can't get enough

And if you wonder

About the spell I'm under

Oh it's your love

(Woah oh baby)

(Oh, oh, oh)

14. "By My Side" INXS

In the dark of the night

Those small hours

Uncertain and anxious

I need to call you

Rooms full of strangers

Some call me friend

But I wish you were so close to me

15. "All I Have To Do Is Dream" The Everly Brothers

When I feel blue in the night

And I need you to hold me tight

Whenever I want you, all I have to do is

Dream

16. "Make It With You" Bread

Dreams, they're for those who sleep

Life is for us to keep

And if you're wondering what this all is leading to

I wanna make it with you

I really think that we could make it, girl

17. "Baby, I Need Your Loving" The Four Tops

Some say it's a sign of weakness for a man to beg

Then weak, I'd rather be

If it means having you to keep

'Cause lately I've been losing sleep

18. "Any Time At All" The Beatles

If the sun has faded away, I'll try to make it shine

There is nothing I won't do

When you need a shoulder to cry on, I hope it will be mine

Call me tonight and I'll come to you

19. "Only Love Can Break A Heart" Gene Pitney

Please let me hold you

And love you for always and always

Only love can break a heart

Only love can mend it again

20. "Don't Give Up On Us" David Soul

We're still worth one more try I know we put a last one by Just for a rainy evening When maybe stars are few Don't give up on us, I know We can still come through

21. "Where Does My Heart Beat Now" Celine Dion

Then one touch overcomes the silence Love still survives Two hearts needing one another Give me wings to fly

22. "Take Me With U" Prince and the Revolution

Come on and touch the place in me That's calling out your name We want each other, oh, so much Why must we play this game?

23. "This Girl Is A Woman Now" Gary Puckett & The Union Gap

This girl is a woman now She's learned how to give This girl is a woman now She's found out what it's all about And she's learning, learning to live

This girl tasted love As tender as the gentle dawn She cried a single tear A teardrop that was sweet and warm Our hearts told us we were right And on that sweet and velvet night A child had died A woman had been born

24. "Eres Tu" Carla Morrison

Quiero contemplarte sin contar el tiempo Dibujarte con mis puros recuerdos En mi mente marcar tus labios, tus besos Estás aquí dentro de mi mente

I want to contemplate you without counting the time that goes by To draw you with memories alone To mark your lips and your kisses in my mind To be here for another moment

25. "Help Is On The Way" Little River Band

Are you always in confusion Surrounded by illusion Sort it out You'll make out Seem to make a good beginning Someone else ends up winning Don't seem fair Don't you care

26. "Right Time of the Night" Jennifer Warnes

It's the right time of the night The stars are winking above It's the right time of the night For making love

27. "Human" The Human League

The tears I cry aren't tears of pain They're all to hide my guilt and shame I forgive you, now I ask the same of you While we were apart, I was human too

28. "I've Got You Under My Skin" Frank Sinatra (also covered by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons)

I'd tried so, not to give in I said to myself this affair never will go so well But why should I try to resist when baby I know so well I've got you under my skin

29. "Just Fall In Love Again" Anne Murray

Magic, it must be magic The way I hold you when the night just seems to fly Easy for you to take me to a star Heaven is that moment when I look into your eyes.

30. "You Needed Me" Anne Murray

You held my hand when it was cold When I was lost, you took me home You gave me hope when I was at the end And turned my lies back into truth again You even called me "friend"

You gave me strength to stand alone again To face the world out on my own again You put me high upon a pedestal So high that I could almost see eternity You needed me, you needed me

31. "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" The Rubinoos

Picture in my mind, I see you and me I, I'm telling you what I wanna be You, you're saying you're in love with me And oh, it feels so good in a dream That I know in life it's just got to be I wanna tell you......

32. "Getcha Back" Beach Boys

I'm getting tired, layin' around here at night Thinking 'bout some other guy holdin' you tight He may have money and a brand new car May even treat you like a movie star And no matter what he ever do for you He can never love you like I can do So if I leave her and you leave him Can we ever get back again?

33. "Tear In My Heart" Twenty One Pilots

My heart is my armor She's the tear in my heart, she's a carver She's a butcher with a smile, cut me farther Than I've ever been

34. "Need You Now" Lady A

It's a quarter after one, I'm all alone and I need you now And I said I wouldn't call, but I'm a little drunk and I need you now And I don't know how I can do without I just need you now

35. "Somebody to Love" Queen

(He works hard) everyday (Everyday) I try and I try and I try But everybody wants to put me down They say I'm going crazy They say I got a lot of water in my brain I got no common sense (He's got) I got nobody left to believe No, no, no, no

(Ooh, ooh, ooh, Lord) Ooh, somebody Ooh (Somebody) Anybody find me Somebody to love Can anybody find me Someone to love?

36. "They Don't Know" Tracey Ullman

There's no need for living in the past Now I've found good loving, gonna make it last I tell the others "don't bother me" Cause when they look at you They don't see what I see

No, I don't listen to their wasted lines Got my eyes wide open and I see the signs Cause they don't know 'bout us And they've never heard of love

37. "Linger" The Cranberries

And I'm in so deep You know I'm such a fool for you You got me wrapped around your finger Do you have to let it linger?

38. "Alone" Heart

You don't know how long I have wanted To touch your lips and hold you tight You don't know how long I have waited And I was going to tell you tonight

39. "Wherever You Will Go" The Calling

If a great wave shall fall And fall upon us all Well then I hope there's someone out there Who can bring me back to you

40. "Never Tear Us Apart" INXS

We could live For a thousand years But if I hurt you I'd make wine from your tears I told you That we could fly 'Cause we all have wings But some of us don't know why

I was standing You were there Two worlds collided And they could never ever tear us apart

41. "Tear In My Heart" Twenty-One Pilots

Songs on the radio are okay My taste in music is your face But it takes a song to come around To show you how

She's the tear in my heart I'm alive She's the tear in my heart I'm on fire She's the tear in my heart Take me higher Than I've ever been

[spencers-renaissance]

I found my way home

Summary: After Spencer tells Hotch about his recent autism diagnosis, he expects that to be the end of it. Somehow, though, it keeps coming up, and Hotch keeps proving himself to be the best father figure he could have asked for. 

Tags: autistic spencer, protective hotch, hurt/comfort, fluff, paternal hotch, team as family

TW: mentions of ableism, one small instance of ableism & homophobia 

Pairing: Gen 

Word Count: 4.1k

Masterlist // Read on AO3

This was borne from my conversations with @criminalmindsvibez about the lack of autistic spencer fics and her amazing headcanons. While I'm not autistic, Emily is, and helped me to portray Spencer's autism as accurately as possible. That said, please feel free to correct me on anything I got wrong :)

Spencer had made an effort to get into work even earlier than usual today. He’d ridden the metro through the city, dipping his hand into his messenger bag every few minutes to compulsively check that the slim letter he’d received in the post the other day is still in the front pocket where he’d safely placed it that morning. He brushes his fingers over the paper once more as he enters the near-empty bullpen, the letter cool from the winter air.

It’s still so surreal to him that this is where he works. After years of dreaming of working for the FBI he’s finally here, and even though it’s been his place of work for almost two months now, he’s still not used to it. The warm offices are a nice reprieve from the wintry December wind, and he can feel himself relaxing as he heads to his desk. Leaving his coat and messenger bag on his chair, he pulls the letter out of the front pocket and runs his index finger along the edge. He finds himself biting his bottom lip as he tries to work up the courage to go and see Hotch. 

Sucking in a deep breath, he marches determinedly up to Hotch’s office, entering as soon as his knocks are answered. 

“Reid,” Hotch says pleasantly as he takes a seat opposite his desk, realising belatedly that he probably should have waited until he was invited. “You’re in early. What can I do for you?”

Nervously, Spencer hands him the letter he’d couriered across the city so carefully. He’d taken care to open it neatly with his letter opener but the return address on the back has been stamped at a crooked angle, and it bothers him every time he notices it. He can’t stop looking at it now as he taps his fingers anxiously against his leg in the pattern of the Fibonacci sequence, a safe and familiar reassurance played out by his nervous fingers. He watches apprehensively as Hotch pulls the letter out of the envelope, unfolding it and skimming his eyes down the page, taking in the news Spencer’s been so anxious to share with him.

Diagnosis: Asperger’s Syndrome

God, it had been a long process. He’d had to seek out a doctor in DC who diagnosed adults, paid for all the consultations and diagnostics himself — his insurance certainly wouldn’t cover it, not that he’d feel comfortable using his cushy FBI insurance for something so personal anyway — and the whole process had taken far longer than he’d expected. Finally, though, the envelope had arrived in the mail, and he officially had a diagnosis. 

Of course, he’d had his suspicions for years, especially after one of his professors during his second PhD had casually asked whether he’d ever been tested, planting a seed in his brain that led to many late nights in the library, reading all the literature available to him. It’s why he’d found it strange that it had felt so validating to finally receive that letter in the post. But it had.

The label made sense, and now that he had a diagnosis from a medical professional he felt comfortable to share it with others; he’d been far too paranoid about being questioned, not being believed or lectured about the evils of self-diagnosis no matter how he was confident in himself. He didn’t tend to be an insecure or self-conscious person, but after years of bullying and trauma surrounding what he now knew for sure to be his autistic traits, he couldn’t help but feel almost protective of his affirming label. 

Now though, it’s an irrefutable statement. Dr Spencer Reid has autism, and the first person he wants to tell is Hotch.

“I had no idea you were getting tested, Reid,” Hotch says, a hint of surprise bleeding into his voice. “Is there any specific reason you wanted to share this with me?”

“Well… I felt like someone on the team should know,” Spencer starts carefully, afraid to give too much of himself away, “and I thought that someone in a leadership position was the best option. Gideon has never been very… supportive of my autistic traits or behaviour, so I thought that you— that you would be the best option.” He feels awkward, fidgeting in his chair as he watches Hotch’s serious face and kind eyes absorb the information. 

“That trust in me means a lot, Reid,” he says, a rare smile making its way onto his face. In that moment, Spencer knows he made the right decision. “How can I make things easier for you? Is there anything you need me to be doing differently?”

“Uh—” He hadn’t really been anticipating that question and it catches him off guard: he’d predicted a quick nod of acknowledgement, a request to photocopy the letter so it can be put on file followed by a swift dismissal, but the letter is now sitting on his side of the desk: clearly, Hotch intends on keeping this between them. This is far from what he expected.

“Why don’t you start by telling me about autism and how it might affect your work?” Hotch corrects himself, recognising quickly Spencer’s need for specifics. “I’ll admit I don’t know much beyond some probably rather unhelpful stereotypes.”

Spencer nods. He can answer that question. “As everyone knows I often go off on tangents,” he begins, “and that’s because my special interests — or hyperfixations — often coincide with our work, so I know a lot about the topics we’re investigating. If I do that, just redirect me to the case and I’ll be fine. It’s also really hard for me to have to present myself in a certain way all the time. Vocal stims and gestures are the most satisfying to me but I often have to mask them, which I’ve never been very good at anyway, and it’s fairly exhausting. That’s why I often excuse myself; I go to the bathroom or a secluded hallway and stim on my own. My doctor also told me I tend to overcompensate in social situations and over-perform emotion. Those are the basics, I guess, but it’s a very complex disorder and since it makes up me as a human being, I can’t exactly explain all of it in one conversation.”

“No, that’s fine, Reid, you’ve given me a good picture of what to expect, thank you.” Hotch smiles at him, fondness in the crinkles around his eyes and the softness invading his usually stern expression. “First of all, you never have to feel like you need to excuse yourself to stim. Do you think it would be helpful if we told the rest of the team so they know what to expect? I’m assuming vocal stims are saying certain words or making sounds…?”

Spencer nods. 

“Okay, so if you needed to do that we could just continue the conversation while you get it out of your system. Gestures certainly wouldn’t be a problem. How do you feel about that?”

He hadn’t really considered telling the rest of the team but it seemed sort of intimidating, like he’d be opening a vulnerable side of himself to people he didn’t even know that well. On the other hand, they’d all been so understanding of his quirks and odd behaviour so far without even knowing the reason behind it. He’d never once been made to feel the way he used to at school, forced to either pretend to be someone else completely or be isolated and ostracised. 

He settles for, “I’ll think about it.” 

“That’s fine. There’s no pressure,” Hotch assures him. “I’m very happy you told me, Reid. I hope you know you can come and talk to me about anything, whether it’s about this or something completely different.”

Spencer leaves his office with the letter back in his hands, no notes or copies having been made, feeling almost elated. Never in a million years would he have expected that to go so well. 

⭐️

He doesn’t really expect it to come up again. He’d told Hotch so that he could understand him a bit better, and also because Hotch had quickly assumed a protective, almost paternal role in his life and he wanted to share the piece of news with him whether he was leading his department or not. That was supposed to be it, though, he didn't think anything would materially change, especially since he decided not to tell the team about the diagnosis just yet.

But almost immediately after he’d told Hotch his diagnosis, his rambles began to be gently redirected back to the case, sometimes without him even noticing. He wasn’t rudely cut off by anyone anymore, Hotch always steering him back on course before anyone else can jump in and hurt Spencer’s feelings. It’s so… kind that it almost feels foreign, and he finds himself gravitating towards the older man more and more, sitting next to him on every jet journey and staying glued to his side during cases. 

His newfound protectiveness over Spencer is only demonstrated more clearly a few months after their conversation in Hotch’s office when they’re on their way to New Mexico for a case. The second he spots that the murder victims had all been found with different Fitzgerald quotes scrawled on sheets of paper found in their own personal notebooks, ripped out and left for investigating officers to find, he launches into an info-dump to rival info-dumps. 

He can’t help that literature is a special interest of his, made all the more intense by the fond childhood memories of reading to his mother in her bed. Fitzgerald had been her favourite author of the Modern Era, and he’d spent hours analysing significant passages in his novels as a child, so he starts explaining the literary merit of each of the quotes left at the crime scenes. 

Apparently, he doesn’t hear the first two times Hotch tries to direct him back on topic, but he hears it when Gideon shouts, “Spencer! Long and unnecessary tangents are not conducive to actually solving these cases. Get back on topic. Now.” He’s loud enough to briefly knock him back several decades to memories of his father screaming at his mother’s schizophrenic babbling, when she’d become convinced that the villains of her favourite novels were trying to break into the house.

Spencer stops mid-sentence and stares at Gideon, who is staring right back. Everyone’s watching the two awkwardly, but the short moment of silence is quickly broken by Hotch. “There is absolutely no need to be that rude, Jason,” he says disapprovingly, while he lays a hand on Spencer’s arm in a light, absent-minded sort of touch. “Reid may have been off-topic but he deserves respect just like everyone else on this team. Nobody needs to be shouted at like that.” He directs his attention back to Spencer. “Why don’t you tell us how those Fitzgerald quotes could help us solve the case, Reid?” 

He gives him an encouraging look, and when he looks around the jet, everyone else is, too. Carefully, he starts speaking again, a little afraid of being cut off again, but after a few sentences of relevant explanation he regains his momentum. It’s more than a little vindicating when it’s his ‘unnecessary tangent’ that ends up being the key to cracking the case. 

⭐️

Soon after Hotch’s split from Haley, he approaches Spencer one evening when they’re the only two left at the office with a dinner invitation. Within the hour, they walk into a nice, low-key Italian place in the city and take a seat in the far corner of the restaurant. 

“Is everything okay?” Spencer asks a little uncertainly, confused as to why his boss is suddenly taking him for dinner. 

“I had this idea almost as soon as you told me about your autism,” Hotch explains, knowing by now that preambles and niceties only frustrate Spencer instead of setting him at ease. “I wanted to take you out for dinner every week to try and give you a space to ramble about all your special interests and not feel like you have to mask around everyone. But when I was with Haley, all my personal time was obviously spent with her and Jack. Now, I have the time to dedicate to you and all the incredible knowledge you’re hoarding in that brain of yours.”

“Really?” Spencer asks excitedly. The idea of uninhibited space to talk about the recent knowledge he’s acquired and not have to feel insecure or worry about performing social skills he doesn’t see the point of is everything he’s ever wished for, and something so wonderful being provided by Hotch only makes it better. 

“Really.”

Spencer wastes no time. He dives right in. “I was just watching a documentary the other day about volcanoes and their ability to trigger lightning storms with their voltage,” he begins. “Basically, magma rises toward the volcano’s surface, its water rapidly turns to vapor, which shatters the molten rock into tiny particles and creates charged particles. When the ash plume erupts into the atmosphere, the densely packed particles collide, driven by momentum. Friction then affects their electrons, becoming electrically charged. Positively and negatively charged electrons separate in the ash plume which creates a charge imbalance that builds an electric charge strong enough to trigger a lightning storm.” 

“That’s incredible.”

“I know,” Spencer says excitedly. “If the ash plume rises high enough in the atmosphere ice forms, and when ice, hail, and supercooled liquid droplets collide, the rates of lightning explode, it’s crazy.”

They’re briefly interrupted by a waitress taking their orders, but as soon as she leaves, Hotch gets him to jump back in. “What about that lecture you attended last week… the literature of 18th Century England or something?”

“19th Century English Lit, yeah!” He’s so eager to finally share this with somebody who will genuinely listen to him, and he can’t help it when his arms start to flap excitedly. Remembering where he is, he doesn’t try to mask it, pin his arms to his sides and simply deal with and suppress the innate urge to stim, he lets his body do what it wants to. Instead of eliciting a strange, sideways look, Hotch just smiles fondly.  

“The lecturer had this fascinating theory on Dickens. I’ve always seen him as a pretty straight forward author of picaresque fiction, obviously combined with facets of melodrama. And it’s common knowledge that he was inspired by the novel of sensibility, of course. But I’d never thought about the stylistic and lexical choices in his works beyond standard analysis, and this lecturer went on a deep dive into his use of collocation and it opened my eyes…”

He spends the whole evening stimming to his heart’s content while detailing every current interest of his to Hotch, who simply listened intently while eating his meal slowly, dragging out the meal for as long as Spencer needed. “Let me give you a lift home,” Hotch insists after footing the bill, leading him out into the warm evening air.

“Oh, I don’t mind taking the metro,” he replies truthfully. 

“I know. But it would make me feel better to drop you home safely. It’s late and seeing you into your apartment building would give me peace of mind.”

“Sure,” Spencer agrees happily, he’s still buzzing from such a nice evening and the least he can do for Hotch is let him rest easy tonight, so he climbs into the passenger side of his car. A few minutes into the car ride home, he realises he should probably actually verbalise just how much he enjoyed dinner. “Thank you, Hotch. I don’t think anybody’s ever done something so nice for me before.”

“Don’t mention it, Spencer,” Hotch replies, smiling even though he doesn’t take his eyes off the road. Spencer very much likes it when Hotch uses his first name, and he’d been doing it all evening. He doesn’t really understand why it feels so nice, just that it makes him feel… special, maybe.

“Don’t mention it, Spencer,” he repeats, before freezing as he realises what he’s said. He’s got so used to not masking all evening, he’s not in the right rhythm and mindset to suppress the urge to repeat Hotch’s words. He’s been so nice the whole evening, the last thing Spencer wants is for Hotch to think he’s mocking him. 

“Hey, it’s okay,” Hotch reassures him, tapping his arm lightly as he smiles encouragingly. 

“Don’t mention it, Spencer,” he says again, repeating it a few times in relief before the itch is satisfied. He really does have the best boss/friend in the whole world. There’s no doubt about that. 

⭐️

Rossi’s initial reaction to Spencer had admittedly been a bit rocky, and having Hotch undeniably on his side was the only thing that made those first few months bearable. He never let them go off on their own; never put Spencer in a position where he’d have to be alone with him. Gradually, though, Rossi adjusted to his quirks and he became almost as protective of Spencer as Hotch.

That doesn’t bode well for the local sheriff when they’re on a case in North Carolina. He’s been prickly since they arrived, being as stubborn and uncooperative as possible, slowing down their progress on actually solving the case, and Spencer’s noticed him being a little extra rude to him in particular. It doesn’t massively bother him — it’s not exactly like someone’s aversion to him is a novel concept — but he can feel some sort of tension coming from the others. It happens a lot more now that they know about his autism and are more aware of themselves and others.

He tries to ignore it the best he can; he puts his head down and focuses on the geographical profile, going wherever he’s sent. Besides, the sooner they solve this case the sooner they can get out of North Carolina and back to DC. On their third day on the case, he’s working quietly in their designated corner of the police department alongside Hotch and Rossi while the others are out investigating in various different places. It’s a nice environment, and even though both men are his superiors, he feels more relaxed in their company than in anybody else’s.

It’s a relatively pleasant morning — considering the whole trying to catch a brutal serial killer thing — until they need to ask the sheriff a question. He saunters over, a tense and angry expression on his face, and Spencer can’t help but feel a little off, the confusing tension in the air that Spencer can’t quite identify making him anxious in his inability to properly decipher it. “Gentlemen,” he says, already frustrated. Spencer suspects it’s a pride thing; not many police departments like being shown up enough to have the FBI called in.

Eager to know the answer to their question, Spencer’s the one to jump in and ask. “Sheriff, we were just wondering whether the town gets much traffic from the local university or—”

He’s cut off by the sneering, towering man. “I’m not taking any questions from your kind,” he says aggressively. 

“I’m sorry?” Spencer squeaks as Rossi and Hotch both prepare to say something in response.

The sheriff cuts them off before they can get their likely diplomatic and calming words out. “Homo retards aren’t welcome around here.”

“Hey!” Rossi shouts as he leaps out of the chair, grabbing him by the collar as he’s helped by the element of surprise. “You don’t fucking talk to Spencer like that, you hear me? Weak, cowardly men like you—”

“Dave,” Hotch says placatingly, putting a hand on his shoulder and diffusing the situation. “Listen, Sheriff, we are only here to help you. But if you can’t respect my agents then we’re going to have a problem. Either you’re civil to Dr Reid, or I’m reporting you to the NC Sheriff’s Association. You hear me?”

The sheriff’s pride is clearly wounded, but he at least nods before giving them all a scornful look and walking away. 

“We didn’t even get to ask the question,” Spencer says anxiously, suddenly feeling out of his depth, like he can’t quite get enough air. 

“Dave, try and get an answer,” Hotch directs, taking charge of the situation. “Spencer, come with me.” He takes him into a secluded hallway for a little privacy, sitting him down on the cool linoleum before sinking down next to him. “You’re okay.”

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” Spencer whispers over and over to himself as he rocks backwards and forwards, trying desperately to self-soothe.

“Do you want me to touch you?” Hotch asks. He’s been in enough of these situations with Spencer to know he’s usually in two very different headspaces: he either longingly craves the grounding touch of a hug or a hand on his back, or he needs complete space. He’s also learned that asking outright is the only way to get an direct answer. 

“Yes,” Spencer replies, before repeating it over and over again as he’s wrapped up in Hotch’s arms, head pressed against his chest, his hand pressing gently against the back of Spencer’s head. He starts to calm down as he manages to breathe to the heat of Hotch’s calm, steady heartbeat, the comforting touch of someone he trusts with his life also helping to bring him back down to earth. A good ten minutes after the altercation with the sheriff, he’s feeling much better and brings his head out of it’s safe cocoon between Hotch’s chest and hand. 

“Come on,” Hotch says kindly. “Let’s get back to the case, yeah? You can just sit and work quietly until you’re ready to hold a proper conversation again. How does that sound?”

Spencer nods tiredly, knowing that work will perk him back up again, and being surrounded by his team will make him feel safe, asshole sheriff or not.

⭐️

Over the years Hotch helps him through any hurdles that come his way, learning the exact nuances of Spencer’s characteristics and requirements, making sure to accommodate him in every way possible.

He brings an extra, super-soft sweater in his go-bag in case Spencer ever forgets his and needs something gentle on his skin but tight enough to make him feel secure. He buys him stimming toys, dropping them on Spencer’s desk before he even arrives at work and lets him use his office whenever the lights and noise of the bullpen get too much, drawing the blinds and giving him the space he needs. Rossi doesn’t even question it anymore when Hotch shows up with a stack of paperwork and moves into his office for the morning. 

It wasn’t until Hotch made a concerted effort to make his life easier that Spencer realised how hard it had been fighting through life on his own. So when he realises Hotch’s birthday is coming up, he decides he wants to show his gratitude. It’s never been easy for him to express emotions, especially since he’s never really found it rude when people don’t thank him, but he knows that for most neurotypical people, appreciation is important. 

So he talks it over with Derek and on Hotch’s birthday, he comes into work to see Spencer waiting in his office with balloons, a cake, a card, and a present. He’d spent hours trying to find the right words to explain how he feels, to find the right words to show Hotch just how much everything he’s done for him means, but eventually he’d settled on something simple:

Caroline B Cooney wrote: “I found my family. I found the right thing to do. I found my way home.” 

I found all of these things when I joined the BAU, but more specifically when I walked into your office, hands shaking, clasping a letter I’d been waiting for all my life. Thank you. 

Hotch reads it with tears in his eyes before taking in the cake, a classic birthday cake Spencer had bought at the store, the words “Happy Birthday Dad” written in blue icing. He didn’t really understand why the cake had stood out to him, or why he associated the word ‘dad’ with someone who wasn’t related to him at all, but he’d trusted his gut and with Derek’s cheerleading, he’d bought it. 

“Oh, Spencer,” Hotch says tearfully. “Can I hug you?”

Feeling only mildly uncomfortable at the visible display of emotion Spencer doesn’t know what to do with, he nods and steps into Hotch’s comforting embrace. “This means the world to me,” Hotch murmurs quietly as he stands, hugging Spencer for as long as the younger man can stand it. 

Spencer’s still not completely sure why he’s managed to make him so emotional, but at least he can trust that it’s a good thing, that Hotch is happy and pleased and reassured. And if he can make him feel even a smidgen as happy as Hotch has made Spencer over the years, well. He’ll consider his long and boring trip into the city to buy the cake, present and card worth it.

Quick Note: Spencer is diagnosed with Asperger’s because that part of the fic is set in 2005. These days he would be diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

taglist: @criminalmindsvibez @strippersenseii

[cattles-bians]

damie vibecca exes au pt 9

post directory

obsetress: ready ok ot4 hc incoming

em: ot4! ot4! ot4

obsetress: after dani breaks up with her viola cuts all her hair off n it's the first impulsive thing she's ever allowed herself to do in her whole life (which should also tell you exactly how fucked up she was by it) n so then we have

obsetress: short curly hair viola

em: what is wrong with you

em: oh i love a dramatic haircut as a motif

obsetress: by the time she and rebecca start hooking up it's grown into a long bob and she keeps that for a while tbh because like

obsetress: viola has impulses all the time but she either: suppresses them, or thinks about them and then does them to the point where they can no longer be considered impulsive

obsetress: vs um

obsetress: dani has impulses all the time and used to suppress them but then fully leaned into

obsetress: charging headfirst into whatever the fuck (vp speech ref sheds a tear)

em: OTP: dont you wanna go apeshitt

obsetress: and thinking about how people change u and rub off on u for the better even after they leave

obsetress: viola: wants to go apeshitt

obsetress: viola: thinks about going apeshitt, thinks about all the ways it would benefit her, thinks about how she would enjoy it even if it did not in any way benefit her

obsetress: viola: yes ok don't you wanna go apeshitt

em: no but i am i am thinking abt like. dani and viola as both sort of? dragged into being housewives and homemakers because Women n viola didn’t really have the power to change her situation (even if she got isabel out of it!) and dani actually managed to call it off

obsetress: YEAH

obsetress: grits teeth

obsetress: once again crying over very intentional very deliberate danvi parallels that no one else wants to talk about and i think even in this au right

obsetress: viola is socialized in such a specific space that this can very much still be true

obsetress: and i think like part of what draws her to dani is exactly that––that dani had the freedom to do that much sooner––but also she resents dani for exactly that too

obsetress: even when they're together, and that's the possession piece too

obsetress: i think a part of her thinks if she can't do it for herself she can have it for herself and that's close enough

obsetress: like she v much covets dani

em: ah the unique way that lesbians fuck each other up bc of living in a homophobic and misogynistic society

em:i mean who doesn’t covet danis ass

obsetress: literally and metaphorically

obsetress: and part of dani definitely knows that but part of dani (at least until she doesn't) likes it

obsetress: (also this is kinda what i was getting at w my insane lil pwp alfjadslf but i think it tracks here too)

obsetress: because she's like "well this is what it's supposed to be but it didn't work with eddie because i don't like men but now i'm with a woman and this is how it's supposed to be"

obsetress: "and i like being wanted it's nice to be wanted by someone i want for once"

obsetress: but yeah thinking a lot about the danvi dynamic once again

obsetress: viola short curly hair to viola long bob

obsetress: YEAH I JSUT

obsetress: WENT TO HER INSTA TO FIND

obsetress: AND THEN GOT

obsetress: SO DISTRACTD

[em note: edited out a 30 minute tangent going through pictures from kates instagram]

obsetress: so anyway the whole point of this. long bob viola

obsetress: rebecca loves long bob viola she rly loves um. sitting on her lap and running her fingers back through her hair

obsetress: when she and dani see each other again for the first time dani's all "oh. you cut your... hair" and vi's like "i did" and dani's like "it, um. looks... it looks... good?"

em: i think it’s nice when viola does something for herself :)

obsetress: it's nice :)

obsetress: i'm happy for her :)

obsetress: wish she didn't have to look so much hotter though :)

obsetress: don't make that face, babe, it's fine :)

obsetress: you know i love you :)

em: WAIT

em: dani had a fucking moment. she’s like

obsetress: oh dani likes her girls w curly hair huh

em: counting on her fingers. how many ppl has she dated w

em: YEAH

obsetress: YEAHDLKFJSLDFDFJSLDFj

em: CURLY BROWN HAIR

obsetress: OH MGOD EDDIE TOO

obsetress: NOT JUST GIRLS

obsetress: aw baby has a type

em: so actually it is DANI who ends up w the strongest routine

em: just short bob hair viola sitting next to jamie and dani has a fuckjng. out of body experience. perceives herself a little too hard

obsetress: she's just. staring

obsetress: mouth def hanging open

obsetress: then someone's like "dani? dani?" and she's blinking like five times in a row and sitting up straight

obsetress: but she does def have that moment at brunch

em: jamie doesn’t twig it

em: violas like. violas got a keen eye for anyone ‘copying’ her style. raises one devastating eyebrow

obsetress: dani and vi devastating eyebrow partners n crime

obsetress: later that night, in bed: jamie?

jamie: wot?

dani: do i have a type?

obsetress: jamie immediately wants to jump to no because how could she have anything in common w––

obsetress: oh. oh

em: jamie’s lil wispy premature greys set her apart

em: ‘jamie HATES it when she has things in common w viola’ is my favourite bit sjddkhd

obsetress: jamie "not sure how viola has no greys n she's how much older than me again" taylor

em: dani realises she actually has. no idea how old viola is

em: barely even knows a birthday

em: maybe viola even has like. a decoy birthday

em: queen of being mysterious for the drama of it all

obsetress: "she's just too stubborn to grey is all" "i'm stubborn!" "mm" "wossat supposed to mean" "you're..." "i'm what" "you like to... pretend? you're stubborn" "pretend i'm–– i am!" "jamie, i asked you to repark the car because i didn't want to get out of bed and it's street cleaning day and you immediately jumped up to do it even though you can barely parallel park"

em: WHIPPED

obsetress: jamie's quiet for a long time then, softly: "can parallel park just fine"

obsetress: "mm"

obsetress: whipped as hell

obsetress: this led me to everyone making dani or viola parallel park all the time when they go anywhere

obsetress: hc dani is a Very Good driver. idk why but it tickles me

em: i think um. dani is v independent and wants to be able to do things herself

em: and i think she probably got her license before eddie, but as soon as eddie got his....

obsetress: and dani's better than him n got a better score than him, and yet

em: and yet!

em: they swap out being deso driver if they’re gonna be drinking. or jsut call a taxi lmao

em: i’m so endeared by Extremely Good Driver Dani

em: dani does a reverse park without thinking

obsetress: viola loves her martinis n dani is drunk off of half a glass of sangria

obsetress: same!!!!!!!

obsetress: also just like. imagining

obsetress: dani checking all her mirrors

em: no

em: HANNAH

obsetress: and adjusting everything so fastidious

obsetress: OH GOD

obsetress: i didn't––

em: i jumped

em: phew it’s actually cute

obsetress: yeah! dw i'm not sick

em: well

obsetress: she just goes through her whole lil checklist and is so meticulous and precise

em: jamies like ‘we’re the same height’ and danis like ‘well.’

obsetress: oh god the four of them driving to the seaside for a vacation together (lots of content to mine here, will have to put a pin in most of it because i am getting sleepy) but they end up taking the truck much to vi’s chagrin just because it can hold the most

obsetress: (like viola doesn’t have a range rover but listen it needs to be dani n jamie’s car for this to work)

obsetress: and vi and rebecca are sitting in the back and then rebecca’s frowning and blinking and digging a headband out of the seat between them and viola immediately just. knows

obsetress: she’s like “dani?” “mm?” “you and jamie... have cleaned your car recently, right?” (jamie’s chiming in: “i’m right here, vi, you can address me too,” viola pointedly ignores her) “um... maybe a couple months ago? why?” “well,” and vi pokes her disdainfully with the headband, “can you at least tell me you’ve had it cleaned between whenever this got stuck between the seats and rebecca and me sitting here now?”

obsetress: dani just GRINS sheepishly

obsetress: “i could tell you that, but...” “but?” dani mumbles “it would be a lie”

obsetress: anyway dunno why vi’s that upset about having to sit in the backseat where dani n jamie hooked up, like, last week when it’s not like she and rebecca haven’t been inside the two of them respectively but it’s absolutely the kind of contrarian shit she’d choose to be pressed about and it makes me laugh so

[volleyball-dontknowher]

hsksjsjss can i get an emergency request? i had a super shitty week and i just kinda wanna get sucked into the earth for a while. can i have some loving kenma fluff, like he's comforting his s/o who's SUPER insecure about how they look and think they're not pretty enough for him? (you can include some nsfw too, 'cause who isn't horny when they're sad?)

Hello lovey!! I am so so so so so sorry to hear you have had a bad week, I hope that things get better for you, and if you need someone to talk to or someone to send you too many pictures of their dog I am here for you any time!! I did include a couple of things I do when I get insecure and I hope that you like it <3 and always know I love you and I think you are so beautiful and absolutely sexy as shit (in a non-harrassing way, I love you) 

Insecure 

Words: 2.1k 

Warnings: Some NSFW and fluff

You knew that Kenma had an internet following, and a passionate one at that, you knew that he had millions of fans who would swoon over his every action and you had to know that because well, he was your boyfriend

What you didn’t know was that other people would make fun of the things that you were already insecure about 

You hated how you looked and couldn’t stand the thought that others did too, you found yourself obsessing about your appearance and trying all of the dumb things to make you feel prettier even though you knew that none of it would work

Most days you could get over it and brush it aside for the sake of your mental health as well as the sake of your relationship, but this week had been so stressful and so shitty that everything had been building on top of each other causing even looking in the mirror to be agony

You had received tons of comments pointing out how your nose wasn’t right for your face and how your smile was so uneven that it made you look like a Disney villain and you couldn't help but take it to heart because that’s what you thought about yourself anyway and these strangers were just telling you facts and helping you feel as though you were useless

You knew that Kenma was going to be working late tonight, it was a launch day and he always tried to get everything done before leaving the office even though he never liked to work later than he had to away from home, but this was good for you, that meant you didn’t have to change or try to look happy about the things that were secretly crushing your insides 

You spent the day laying in bed watching TV and scrolling through your social media’s as you compare yourself to the pretty girls that seemed to appear everywhere without any flaws, you ended up getting yourself more upset than before, as you let the tears run down your face and decided to take a break from your phone and just focus on the episode of Criminal minds that was on

This was good for you because well there wasn’t ever anyone crazy attractive on there and you were more focused on trying to solve the case before the detectives did 

You ended up just sitting there mindlessly for several episodes before you heard the door slam shut, you couldn't help but be paranoid as you jolted upright in bed, worried that someone was now breaking into your house, before you had time to react you heard Kenma’s voice call out your name, not once but three times in a panic looking for you 

You cal his name back quietly in hopes that he wouldn’t come and find you, you were wrong, of so wrong, Kenma came into the bedroom immediately and the moment he saw you his heart dropped, you were sitting there alone with tear stains down your face

This was the last thing that he ever expected to come home to and he knew that he had to say something and figure this out with you 

“Hey,” he started, looking at you with but worry, as he dropped his bag and climbed into bed with you, wrapping his arms around your shoulders as he rubbed up and down your arms and placing a quick kiss to your temples, “what’s wrong love?” he whispered, lips pressed against your hair, he was trying not to panic, but seeing you so upset makes everything in him worried

You didn’t know how to answer him, opening and closing your mouth several times in an attempt to try and get the words out, instead, your eyes started welling up again instead, you couldn't help but start crying again

Kenma had no idea what was wrong and didn’t want to upset you more, “Y/N, I love you, and I know we can get through this together. You are so kind, and intelligent, and sweet, and loving and beautiful, I love you more than anything.” he said, which felt uncharacteristically unlike him, but everything he said was the truth, he really did love you with everything he had

Instead of calming you down it only made you cry harder, “I’m not pretty,” you choked out between sobs

Kenma had never disagreed with anything more in his entire life, “Y/n, how could you say that?” he questioned, pulling you closer to him

“I’m ugly, my face, my body, my weight, my everything, it’s ugly,” you cried out. This time Kenma was the one opening and closing his mouth, he had no idea why or how you felt this way and he just wanted to make you feel better and that didn’t work, he couldn’t imagine what made you feel this way, “I’m fat and I hate my face and I don’t know why you are with someone that is as ugly as me,” you continued on your tangent, unable to stop yourself 

This was the last straw, Kena pushed you down onto the bed and laid on top of you, pinning you down with his hips, “Y/n, I am with you because I love you, because I think you are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever set my eyes on. If you could only see yourself through my eyes then you’d see nothing but beauty and you would find yourself too gorgeous for me. I can’t imagine looking so beautiful and not seeing it, you are stunning Y/n and I want you to know that when I call you pretty I mean it with everything in my heart. You know me, and you know that I don’t lie, there’s no reason to and I could never exaggerate your beauty because there is just so much of it.” he says, never breaking eye contact with you. When he is done, he leans down and kisses your forehead, “You’re beautiful here,” then he kisses your temple, “you’re beautiful here too” then he kisses your nose, “you’re beautiful here too,” he murmurs as he goes to do the same to each of your cheeks

“Stoooop Kenma,” you try pushing him off of you but he just smacks your hands away

“Y/n, you are beautiful everywhere and if you don’t see if then I am going to show it to you,” he gives you a mischievous little smile before kissing your lips lightly and moving down to kiss your jaw and your neck, “You are gorgeous.” “You are stunning.” “I love you.” He continues as he kisses down your body, his hands roaming up your shirt as he slowly pulls it off of you

His lips make contact with one breast, then the other, gently licking and sucking on the delicate flesh, making you moan out his name

Kenma had the tiniest smile on his face as he continued kissing down your sensitive skin as he praised every part of your body, telling you all of the things he loves about you 

When he reached your waistband you couldn’t help but shiver as he left open mouth kisses on your hips as his cold fingers slipped down inside the elastic and slowly pulled them off of you, his eyes glancing back up at you, pupils blown wide as he continued kissing down your hips and stopped right before your panties, he toyed with the fabric before looking up at you and sliding them off

“Fuck” he panted as he saw how exposed you are, “beautiful” 

He began kissing down your hips and placing gentle little bites along your thighs, scattering little marks as his eyes stayed focused upon you, never once breaking eye contact 

His head slowly shifted down between your legs as he licked one slow stripe up your throbbing core

You let out a breathy moan as your fingers went to his hair and pulled gently 

“Fuck, you’re so fuck,” he moaned before going back to licking your dripping core, after a few long strokes his tongue wrapped around your clit and began flicking it quickly as his fingers began stroking your heated core before pushing two completely inside of you and curling them perfectly to hit the best spots inside of you 

A whiny moan left your lips as you tried to raise your hips closer to Kenma but he wasn’t having it, he pushed your hips right back down, “don’t shy away from me, let me enjoy you,” he moaned before pulling his fingers out and replacing them with his tongue, his arms wrapping around your thighs and pulling you closer

You couldn’t help but let out a long needy moan as his tongue pulsed in and out of you, licking up all of your wetness as his fingers went to your clit and began expertly rubbing circles into it 

Your hands were tugging Kenma’s hair as he switched back and forth from long deep licks to quick and shallow ones, as he held you close to his face enjoying your juices smearing down his face

 Quickly your orgasm approached as Kenma replaced his tongue with his fingers and began driving three into your desperate hole as his mouth and nose pushed into your desperate clit, giving it the stimulation you needed as he hummed lightly, sending vibrations straight to your clit 

You were a moaning mess at this point and couldn’t help but whine as he perfectly hit all of the spots inside of you as you felt yourself come undone beneath him, moaning his name as he continued to lick and suck you clean 

When he was finished licking every part of you clean he slowly pulled back up your panties before laying down next to you 

“I love you,” he whispered before pulling you on top of him, “every single part of you,” he starts, looking straight into your eyes, “you are my dream, when I would dream at night I always imagined a girl just like you, I want nothing else, you are perfect,” he sighed before kissing the top of your head

You couldn’t help but start tearing up at his kind words, “Kenma-” you started

“Shh, no but’s no if’s nothing, you are gorgeous, and I love you,” he coos as he rubs your hair, “if you ever think anything like that again, tell me, right away, okay baby, I’m gonna make you see just how beautiful you are.” he smiles before cupping your cheek in his hand and placing a quick kiss on your lips

You lay there for a while before he nudges you off of him and starts rummaging through your clothes 

He pulls out an outfit for you and smiles weakly at you, “you tried this on and loved it, now you should wear it out to dinner,” he stated, smiling even bigger

You instinctively shook your head no, “Kenma, I can’t wear that out,” you stammer

“Why not?” he questions, “It looks amazing on you.” 

“Kenma bab-”

“Kenma what?” he sasses you, “when you tried it on you were glowing, now put it on and let’s go get Thai, okay?” he smiled at you

You couldn’t help but feel giddy putting the outfit on, you secretly did love how it looked on you, you just got nervous about what others would think about you in it but every time you would glance around nervously at dinner Kenma grabbed your hand and said one word, “beautiful” 

He even went as far as taking cute pictures of you for your Instagram and smiling at you, telling you how good you looked after every single one, not only did Kenma make you feel amazing, but he also took the most gorgeous pictures of you that you’ve ever seen, he kept smiling at you and telling you his favorite part of each picture as he scrolled, one he would complement your smile and the next he would complement your beautiful eyes, then your gorgeous pose and when you got blushy he just shrugged and sent you the pictures telling you that he said what he meant and that you really are that pretty 

He even let the two of you get some cuteeee pictures together which is rare for Kenma because he prefers to not take pictures at all, but you two got the best pictures together and it ended up being both of your new screensavers, and every time you saw Kenma open his phone to a picture of you he always gave it a little smile and a pause before going on to do whatever it was he needed his phone for

[spockandawe]

So! I got that question last night about whether my xiyao fic took place before or after Jin Guangyao killed Nie Mingjue and his father, and like I said, part of my immediate reaction was ‘I don’t know, does it even matter?’ but I wanted to shake that idea a little and see what else shook out, because I wrote that fic from Lan Xichen’s point of view on purpose, and there are all kinds of things he’s not aware of. I’m long-winded, have a cut.

From a practical pov perspective, it genuinely does not matter whether or not Jin Guangyao has done those particular murders yet, because Lan Xichen isn’t going to find out about it until after Wei Wuxian’s resurrection. With me writing from his point of view, he’s going to be a bit sadder after Nie Mingjue dies, but that’s not necessarily something that will noticeably impact this relationship, other than maybe cherishing his surviving sworn brother a little bit more. And maybe he’ll be a little more at ease after Jin Guangshan dies and someone he, trusts on a personal level is leading the Jin Sect, but that’s just an extra degree of complication to whether or not they could do a relationship period, and there was already plenty of complication to go around.

And on the level of a wider perspective, like..... does it matter if Jin Guangyao has done these two extra murders? Both of them went through the sunshot campaign and are very acquainted with all kinds of ugliness and death by now. Jin Guangyao was a double agent under Wen Ruohan, and in just the little piece of that we’re shown, we see him very casually killing some Nie Sect people to maintain his cover (or in case he needs to side with the winning team, whatever). And after the war is over and his father gives him his very conditional recognition, he gets pressed into service as his father’s torturer. He’s already up to his elbows in blood, and Lan Xichen knows that, and still canonically cares deeply for him and trusts him anyways, whether that care is platonic or not.

Also, as a side note, I have seen people who do give attention to those atrocities instead of just picking out two deaths from a whole cheese platter of them, and I find it really interesting how much less grace is given to Jin Guangyao than is given to characters like Wei Wuxian. Some of that is down to natural sympathy with a likeable pov character, but like... Lan Wangji witnessed the end of Wei Wuxian’s brutal torture campaign with Wen Chao, for example, but people don’t expect them to sit down and have a conversation about it, never mind have a moralizing conversation about how ‘wei ying, you know that was very naughty of you, and you’d better realize it was wrong and bad and never do it again.’ All of the characters except the youngest generation have lived through a lot of awful things, and that’s... numbing. I would be shocked to see any of them sit down and discuss it openly, never mind expect it from them before they’re permitted to be loved.

Now, back to JIn Guangyao’s murders. Would Lan Xichen knowing about those two particular extra deaths matter? Yeah, definitely. Lan Xichen also cared very deeply for Nie Mingjue, and having your father raped to death is all kinds of fucked up, plus there are the cultural taboos about killing your dad, etc. But I would also argue that in the story, Jin Guangyao tries shields Lan Xichen from the ugliest parts of himself. It gets a little complicated to provide textual explanations for this, because they both spend most of their time off screen, and I’m not going to get pulled into an long side tangent, but bear with me.

But just from a character perspective, it only makes sense. At a bare minimum, it’s protecting himself. He’s terrified of everyone and everything, he says. Nobody is more aware than he is of how precarious his social position is, and his father did nothing to help him with that. Lan Xichen likes him and trusts him, even though he knows some of the terrible things he’s done. So why wouldn’t Jin Guangyao shield him from the things that might turn Lan Xichen against him? And if self-preservation also aligns with not hurting Lan Xichen as well... Why wouldn’t he avoid hurting Lan Xichen? We see him handling him gently at other times, even after he was in a position where he could have used force. I do wish very much that we could have gotten in his head in canon, but reading into the motivations behind his actions is half the fun, so what do I know, haha. 

I’m not going to convince anyone who’s like ‘bluh bluh jin guangyao never cared for a single person in the world beside himself’, but I honestly think that makes the character profoundly boring and also doesn’t make much sense. Even if he only ever cared for one (1) person beside himself (still think that’s a boring read, but hey), then that person would have been Lan Xichen. It isn’t a one-way street, where Jin Guangyao just takes and takes. He helped Lan Xichen rebuild he cloud recesses. Even if that got him a closer ally and stronger political alliance, it wasn’t a necessary gesture to make. Nobody would have criticized him for just standing by and not spending piles of money on the rebuilding. He didn’t help Lanling Jin the same way, after all. I’m getting lost down this rabbit hole, but my point is that while it’s not that hard to read mercenary motivations into any one single thing he does, there is a pattern of behavior in his treatment of Lan Xichen particularly, and that pattern makes the most sense if care and compassion are involved. Jin Guangyao’s motivations when it comes to Lan Xichen make the most sense when they’re at the intersection of self-preservation and affection, and other reads on him just are not nearly as compelling to me.

Anyways! Back on topic. If there’s a xiyao relationship while JIn Guangyao is Jin Guangyao, even if he hasn’t killed Nie Mingjue and Jin Guangshan yet, he’s... probably at least thinking about it. He’s maybe working on it a lil bit in the background. And one, he’s already an experienced torturer tho, and two, Lan Xichen already cares about him even though he’s a torturer. I think it’s actually much more interesting to try to determine where the story falls in terms of where Jin Guangyao stands in regards to Xue Yang. Is he actively collaborating with him yet? Is he actively providing him with materials? Even if Lan Xichen would have a hard time forgiving Jin Guangyao for what he did to Nie Mingjue, I also think he’s capable of understanding why Jin Guangyao was so terrified when it came to Nie Mingjue. Even if he didn’t agree with him in the end, I think he would be able to listen and understand. He would just go into a horrible conflicted deadlock of grief and emotions and withdraw to seclusion for the foreseeable future. I think it would be much, much more damaging to Lan Xichen to know that Jin Guangyao was feeding a supply of innocent people to Xue Yang for experimenting. 

In the end, it’s rarely an interesting question to me of how many bad things a given character has done at any given point in a shippy story like the one where I got this question, because like... This fictional mass murderer from ancient fantasy china is still capable of love, so. Now, am I talking about JIn Guangyao? Or am I talking about Xue Yang? Wei Wuxian? Jiang Cheng tortured and killed a bunch of demonic cultivators, but like.... still want him to reconcile with his brother tho. What kind of boring reading would I be doing if nobody involved was allowed to make a bad decision ever? A chronic series of bad decisions? Xuexiao is so compelling to me because of the sheer amount of terrible decisions Xue Yang has made before he starts wanting to be loved. Wei Wuxian comes back from the dead exhausted and wrung out and dragged down by the weight of his first life. He’s confronted by people who are like ‘it’s your fault I lost my leg!’ or whatever, and Lan Wangji doesn’t pull away to be like ‘wow, that man is right, that is really terrible of you, let’s have a conversation until you tearfully self-flagellate enough to earn my love again.’

So the question about my fic doesn’t really have an answer. Has Jin Guangyao killed Nie Mingjue or his father yet? Idk! Haha, probably! Or he’s at least working on it, he’s a busy little bee. And none of that has any bearing at all on his ability to love Lan Xichen (except now that i think about it, their deaths would probably make it easier for him to have that conversation, because there are fewer external threats to his safety, and he has more space to consider voluntarily allowing more vulnerability into his life). Would knowledge of those deaths impact Lan Xichen’s ability to love him? They would make it a lot more hecking complicated, that’s for sure, but that is also the canonical seasoning of this relationship, platonic or romantic. And, incidentally, it’s the exact spice I crave. I would have no interest in this relationship if they were two perfect angels, I am here because Lan Xichen is an absolute doll, and Jin Guangyao both cherishes him above everything else and has deliberately done terrible things that wounded him deeply. That’s the appeal.

[rheawritessometimes]

Ooh matchups!! I am here lol 👀

May I get a romantic matchup w one of the adult male characters?

Personality:

I come off as very friendly and sociable bc I'm too socially awkward to gracefully turn down a chat lmao. Don't get me wrong I do like talking with people but bc I'm too anxious to interrupt people when I have my own thoughts I often end up listening to the other person go on and on and it feels like they're just talking at me :/ I would very much appreciate someone who realizes this and actually pauses to ask for my opinion to make me feel included in the conversation

On the other hand, if the other person is willing to listen, I will ramble for hours about my own interests (and also go on like five tangents before I inevitably lose my original point lmao). I'm a biologist so point out any living thing to me and I'd probably have several fun facts ready to share

I almost always have a smile on my face when I'm out in public or anywhere I'd see another person. I just really don't want to come across as rude so I smile at everybody lol

This unfortunately has the side effect of making me hide my negative feelings from my friends. It's not that I'm actively trying to — if they caught me in the moment I'd at least be honest about my feelings — but I tend to push all the negativity to the back of my mind whenever I'm out with friends and only really address it when I'm alone at night. I also have a hard time showing any sort of weakness to anyone, despite my philosophy of "always talk to your friends about your problems." It's just that I'm supposed to be the one who has it together, so I feel like I have no one to go to when I need help. I'm trying to change this habit but it's been difficult lol

Likes/Dislikes:

Communication is so important to me. As someone who's very nonconfrontational I try to do all I can to avoid an argument. And honestly, being honest with each other will solve like 99% of the misunderstandings that people regularly have anyway

I love pretty much all creatures (tho my favorites are cats and also dragons even though they're not real) prob bc as a biologist, I have an appreciation for all living things and the roles they play in the world. I'm the type of person to trap the spider and bring it outside. These little critters are just trying to live like the rest of us!!

As for dislikes, I'm not a fan of jealousy in a partner. I guess some people find it hot when your s/o gets possessive of you but I'd rather just trust my partner and have them trust me? And when you do feel jealous like,, talk to your partner about what's making you uncomfortable?? Idk maybe it's just me lol

Hobbies:

I love drawing, writing, and piano!

I also love learning new things. Idk if it's really a hobby but I do enjoy adding to my collection of random trivia

Extras:

My love language is quality time and physical touch

I tend not to pay attention to my day to day life so I end up forgetting a lot of details about what happened the past few days. If someone brings it up I'd be like oh yeah that happened!! But if they were to ask me what I did last week I'd draw a blank lmao

I'm pretty sure all the tall boys in Genshin are a good head taller than me so do w that what you will lol

I absolutely make kissy faces and baby talk at cats and dogs

I tend to be pretty awkward with kids bc I don't know how to communicate with them. I can't even talk to adults who can articulate their thoughts you think I'm gonna understand children??

Dskgjsjd okay this was,, very long I'm sorry ;; but I hope it gave you a lot to work with haha!! Thank you in advance :D

I match you with...

Diluc!

Diluc is the type to regularly ask for your input and opinions when talking with you. He’s very aware of the fact that if it’s just him talking, it’s not a conversation. Even with other people, if he feels like you’ve been ignored he’ll divert the conversation to you as smoothly as possible.

Listening to you is a way to get to know you better, he’s keen to store details about your interests in his mind. Will he write them down in a hidden journal to make sure he doesn’t forget the most important parts? Maybe.

If you’re just looking to ramble about your interests to someone, he’s happy to listen to you talk while he’s doing paperwork and similar activities. His full attention may not be on you but he retains some of the details and will perk up and comment on anything that he finds particularly interesting.

The juxtaposition between smiling you and broody Diluc as you walk down the street together is *chef’s kiss*. It’s not that he’s necessarily unhappy, it’s just kind of become his neutral look over time.

I’m gonna be honest, it takes this man a while to figure out that you tend to hide your feelings. But! Once he does figure it out he regularly asks you how you feel. He just wants to check up on you and if he can help you with something that’s bothering you, he absolutely will. He doesn’t think you should rely on each other, but you should absolutely support each other.

Diluc is a very honest man, but sometimes he can be a bit blunt in expressing himself. He doesn’t mean to come across as rude or anything, but he’s not always the most delicate when using his words. Diluc would say “This is bland.” rather than, “I think we can improve this by adding some spices. :)” He usually means well, though.

Entirely indifferent to animals but if it makes you happy he will move spiders outside instead of squashing them. Even when you’re not around.

Diluc isn’t exactly the jealous type when it comes to other people giving you attention but he does absolutely take notice and is paying extra close attention if someone starts flirting with you. He gets a little more annoyed if you’re actively interacting with him when it happens, but when you’re more on your own he can’t really blame anyone for taking interest in you. Diluc won’t do anything about it and will let you handle it yourself however you see fit unless the person starts getting pushy. Mostly just concerned for your comfort and safety.

This man absolutely knows how to play the piano. If you’ll let him, he wants to listen to you play and if you play the piano with him? Makes his heart so happy, his smile will be so soft. Absolutely thinks about proposing when you play together.

Something about being in the same room as you when you’re writing or drawing and he’s reading or doing work feels so right to him. Even if you’re not interacting, peacefully spending time together while being productive is time well spent, he thinks.

You being smaller than him isn’t something he really pays much attention to. It doesn’t make much of a difference. His thoughts on it are pretty much just, Well, it does make it easier to pull you out of danger. That’s good.

Diluc feels conflicted when you’re babying animals. On one hand, he finds it very adorable. But, it is one of the only times he feels moderately jealous over the fact a cat is getting your attention and not him. He doesn’t get jealous when you spend time with other people or even when you interact with animals in any way other than this. Why does he feel like this? Nobody knows. But it’s true, I feel it in my bones.

Equally awkward if not more so with children. Luckily for him, he’s ‘weird and grumpy’ so kids don’t really seek him out much. It might even keep kids away from you when you’re with him, unless they really like you.

It wasn’t often Diluc wore a pink shirt, actually, you were pretty sure he had never worn one. You don’t recall ever seeing one on him and it was hard to imagine him going out and making the purchase. The sight was unusual enough that when you saw him wearing the pale pink button-up while looking over a few papers in his study, you couldn’t help but ask about it.

“I didn’t know you owned any pink shirts. Is it new?”

Crimson eyes flicked up from the papers in his hand to you. He placed the papers down, leaning back in his chair. You could see his cheeks turning a bit pink, too. The pause he took and his flushed face made you think he was embarrassed about it.

“One of… There was a mixup and one of your red items got mixed in with my white clothes. I don’t have any other clean button-ups at the moment,” he told you bashfully. The bit of color was different from his usual black attire, but you didn’t think it was anything for him to be quite so embarrassed about.

“It looks good,” you assured him, “Maybe you should wear pink more often.”

[mittensmorgul]

I've watched season 11 again, and I have a question if you're willing to answer. In season 5, Cas was very disappointed about learning God was basically a "dead beat dad," as Dean called it. But when Cas had an opportunity to talk to Chuck, he didn't seem all that interested in talking to him or even asking a question or two. Why do you think they never had Cas interact with Chuck as a son talking to his father when it was such a huge deal for Cas in season 5?

Hi there! I’m happy to talk about this, because honestly I was personally GLAD that Cas treated Chuck the way he did in s11.

(A/N: I was halfway through writing this when my power went out last night, so now that everything is back on I’m gonna see if I remember wtf I was even talking about... if this goes sideways halfway through, blame Potomac Edison)

Cas had already realized long before exactly who and what Chuck was. I mean, not that Chuck was actually God, but that God and “His Plan” was always a load of BS.

Chuck left the angels a lot of conflicting information, and not a lot in the Free Will and Critical Thinking arena. I was just thinking about season 6, and this sort of feeds into a lot of the same distinction between Cas and the rest of the angels. My personal line of thinking earlier this evening was this line in 6.20:

CASTIEL I'm doing this for you, Dean. I'm doing this because of you. DEAN Because of me. Yeah. You got to be kidding me. CASTIEL You're the one who taught me that freedom and free will -- DEAN You're a freakin' child, you know that? Just because you can do what you want doesn't mean that you get to do whatever you want!

Major Tangent Warning, because I gotta write out what I was thinking earlier in order to explain why I am So Pleased with Cas and his reaction to Chuck in s11, which I think of as abject disdain. This is key to everything Cas had learned, to all of his growth as a person up to that point.

What Dean tells Cas here is in direct contradiction to what Raphael’s self-stated motive in restarting the apocalypse was. Also from 6.20:

RAPHAEL You rebelled - against God, heaven, and me. Now you will atone. We'll start by freeing Lucifer and Michael from their cage. And then we'll get our show back on the road. CASTIEL Raphael...No. The Apocalypse doesn't have to be fought! RAPHAEL Of course it does. It's God's will. CASTIEL How can you say that?! RAPHAEL Because it's what I want. CASTIEL Well, the other angels won't let you. RAPHAEL Are you sure? You know better than anyone, Castiel. They're soldiers. They weren't built for freedom. They were built to follow.

Raphael is just doing “whatever he wants,” in the way Dean was trying to convince Cas NOT to. Because if Dean learns anything in s6, it is the cosmic cost of his own actions. Think 6.11, and the lessons he learns having to play Death for a day. As much as Dean tries to work around the Bigger Picture of the Universe, he does understand that there is a right and a wrong, and that some things are worth fighting or even dying for, but the cost might sometimes just be too great. And unleashing all the souls in purgatory on the planet seems like just a different sort of apocalyptic level of bad... like putting out a fire with a flamethrower.

Cas had to make a choice here. He’d chosen his path every step of the way, wrestled with each decision he’d had to make over the previous year leading up to that point, but he’d passed the point of no return, and his direct prayer to Chuck went unanswered, and he never got a sign whether he was doing the right thing or not.

I’ve argued in the past that he absolutely DID get a sign, in the form of Dean telling him to stop in 6.20. But Cas dismissed him, out of pride, out of hubris, out  of desperation to do the one thing he believed could give him the power to stop Apocalypse 2.0, save Heaven, and also save Dean in the process, since Dean would be back on the radar to be Michael’s vessel if Raphael succeeded in breaking him out of the Cage.

And here’s the really tangenty part of the tangent: it just made me think of all the nitwits who won’t wear a mask in public, or follow social distancing rules because MAH FREEDUMB, you’re impinging on MAH LIBERTY. BUT THE CONSTITUTION!

Because yes, we can do what we want, but we can’t do WHATEVER we want when our actions are harmful to others!

The framers of the Constitution could never have foreseen a pandemic like this. But any SOCIETY where people must coexist needs to put some constraints on liberty, and the framers absolutely DID understand this.

They also couldn’t have foreseen air travel, but we have established rules about this. They couldn’t have foreseen cars and traffic lights and interstate highways, and yet we have rules that govern our behavior there, as well. Air traffic controllers, stop signs, speed limits-- we don’t just have the right to drive 90 mph through a school zone and run through red lights. And yet nobody yells BUT MAH FREEDUMB! when they get a speeding ticket.

Polite society ALSO must include *MY* right not to be killed because someone else decided that traffic laws didn’t apply to them, see?

Basically, wear your mask and shut up about it, whiny pissbabies. This is what is required of you to live in a functioning society. You do NOT have the right to infect others with a potentially deadly illness. Full stop.

But back to Cas and the Leviathan infection he’s about to infest the entire planet with...

Dean was effectively giving him the “wear a mask, nitwit” speech, but on a cosmic level.

And Cas had to live with the consequences of his choice, with the GUILT and DEPRESSION that resulted. And he spent the next few seasons desperately trying to make up for what he’d done, to atone and do whatever he could to redeem himself-- to Dean. He’d tried to redeem himself to Heaven, but the more he eventually began to learn about Humanity, the less affinity he felt for his fellow angels, and for Chuck’s construct of Heaven.

Because back to another previous point, Chuck effectively left the angels two opposing sets of instructions: orders to watch over the earth and act as shepherds to humanity, and orders to bring on the apocalypse at any cost. Can’t do both, truly. Even Naomi will eventually say, right before Metatron stabs her in the head, that she (and the other angels) forgot that their true mission was to protect and defend humanity, and she didn’t know when or why that ever changed.

FINALLY back to the point! WHEEE!

Basically, Cas has, in the six years between s5 and s11, experienced “god-ness” from every angle, experienced his own guilt over what he now believes were misguided actions, that sometimes Humanity has a better answer, and there are some things that just aren’t worth it in the long run.

Mostly, he’s realized just HOW deadbeat Chuck has always been. And the revelation that Chuck had actually been God all along? Saw their pain and suffering at trying to STOP the apocalypse all those years before? KNEW FULL WELL that Sam, Dean and Cas were doing everything they could to try and save the world from basically the entirety of Heaven and Hell, who were plotting the destruction of humanity and most of creation with it. I mean... Cas spent s5 begging for God’s help, to save the world, to convince Michael and Lucifer that they did not have to destroy humanity, and Chuck... had done LESS than nothing. He’d sat there and ghoulishly watched the entire mess unfold like a bad tv show... oh wait... :’D

By s11, Lucifer had not reached that point that Cas had. Lucifer had many other issues, having been rejected and locked up for most of existence, and even HE had been the one in 5.22 to try and talk Michael out of enacting Chuck’s battle plan. Lucifer never had the experiences Cas did (and despite being given every opportunity to have them over the next few seasons after s11, he continues to reject those experienced at every turn anyway, only serving to highlight the difference between Cas and, honestly, most of the rest of the angels). Lucifer had a personal need for a direct apology from Chuck for everything he’d been put through-- starting with taking on the original Mark and ending with the cage.

Of course Lucifer didn’t get an honest apology, because in the end, it was all just a theoretical production to Chuck. He had never apologized, in any of his universes, to any of the beings he created. And he never would. And on some level, Cas-- via his experiences, what he himself had already come to understand about God and creation-- already understood this about Chuck.

Cas... didn’t care about him anymore. He cared about HUMANITY, about Chuck’s CREATION. The creator might be a worthless jerk, but what came out of his creation is a thing of ultimate beauty. Humanity, love, free will, and the beauty of the universe is what ends up saving the world in 11.23, so I’ve chosen to accept this read of Cas and his relationship and opinions of Chuck. Because it’s perfectly in line with the “moral” of season 11.

Plus it’s just so personally satisfying to me watching each individual character’s reactions to Chuck, and understanding how that aligns with all of their personal arcs.

Dean: brought the “how could your forsake your creation” of a broken-hearted son who has finally seen the truth. something he worked out YEARS ago between himself and his own father, so it didn’t come with that particular personal baggage and didn’t completely break him in the process (as it may have done with Cas had Chuck revealed himself, say, in 7.01...)

Sam: brought his life-long hope that God was real, his faith in God’s inherent “goodness,” did the Chuck Fanboy for a bit before seeing Chuck a lot more clearly. He was able to relinquish his idol worship of Chuck as the Savior of Humanity.

Cas: had brought his experience of Humanity and Godhood, the entire spectrum of Creation that he had experienced for himself and grown through. Cas, for all his mistakes, had never stopped TRYING to do the right thing, never stopped doing everything in his power to save humanity and creation from every cosmic threat, while Chuck himself had only hidden away and watched from the sidelines, when he’d ALWAYS had the power to make everything good and right and allow the Winchesters their peace. Honestly, what BETTER response than to treat Chuck like a bit of gum stuck to his shoe?

Metatron: who had basically spent s9 trying to turn himself into Chuck Lite, literally plagiarizing his Supernatural novels to create his own origin story as the new God, and failed miserably. What other angel could truly confront Chuck, writer to writer, and call him out for His Story? Even fallen as low as he could go, Metatron understood first-hand the responsibility of The Cosmic Author in ways even Cas couldn’t, because narrative symmetry. Metatron was always about the Word, as God’s Scribe. He was a bad copy of the original with the names scratched out. He basically wrote the worst self-insert fanfic of all time. And that gave him the narrative space to confront Chuck about everything that Cas no longer had. Cas had long since rejected that role, sided with Humanity, and smashed Chuck’s Word. The original tablet-breaker.

Crowley: carried on Crowley-ing. Doing the best he could with what he had, and somehow miraculously BS’ing his way through.

Rowena: recognized the Biggest Power in the room and ingratiated herself to it for comfort and protection, and hopefully for a bit of power and security.

Billie: gosh she just stepped in at the 11th hour to annoy Chuck. :’D

But yeah, I’ve always been incredibly pleased that Cas basically ignored Chuck in s11. Good for him.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

even more prompts catchup

April 5th: What was school like for you, or what is it currently like for you if you are still in school? Elementary, high school, post-secondary?

i Hate/d school lmfao......like i do Like To Learn and Know Shit, and of course Sometimes / on some occasions it was like, hey i'm having a good to pretty great time at school, but those were usually Special occasions or teachers going out of their way to give us you know, fun projects / go beyond the Standardized Testing curriculum, which natch they couldn't always do / did require sort of going Above & Beyond, rather than being the constant, guaranteed experience of like hooray for school......it's like, oh hooray re: the Play Scenes my fourth grade english class did that was like, an Extra thing, where we got to audition and i just had a great time like oh right, clearly Theatre in retrospect, or hooray re: the field trips, or projects we did In Class, since i hated homework.......i was always that accursed (i mean, not accursed for Me, but) combination of "really a terrible student but also gets great grades" lmao i forever do things Last Minute but like, when i was At school, in class, i'd just power through whatever work there was then & there usually, and in middle school would sometimes do hw on the bus, as i was the last on the bus route to be picked up in the morning or dropped off in the afternoon, but as soon as i got home i was in Home Mode and yknow. didn't just sit down and continue School Stuff asap. also hardly ever Studying unless it's the night / morning before a test lmfao but i had a great memory for that stuff, so studying that last minute was like "yep, i Do remember this from going over it 2 seconds ago" so yknow, despite hating school / no good Study Habits(tm) or anything, i did fine. i also read a ton, at home or at school and at any other point. so i was also like, quiet and generally ~well behaved~ or whatever lol (the like "how are kids (or anyone) supposed to stay focused and on task for 7+ hours a day..." thing), segue into next paragraph

i also remember like, 3 day a week preschool being the first time i was, you know, in some sort of School and also around other kids that much, i did have this sense that like, somehow there were Rules that i wasn't following, not re: Classroom Rules or something, but wrt socializing with peers, like that everyone else had something going on in how they interacted which i wasn't gonna get right, & i had this sense of like, not really being Allowed to interact lmao, even being 4 years old i have a few distinct memories re: this of like, a) choosing to play by myself in the classroom or when outside, and b) my "best friend" being the one person who just like, chose to hang out with me lmfao, but i was like oh cool Having A Friend lmao, like i didn't Not want to have friends, i was just already aware of like, i don't feel like i can just up and interact w/these people and i don't feel like they want me to, and c) re: that being aware of whatever Rules Of Interaction existing and that i wouldn't meet them / abide by them and thus there'd be some kind of repercussion for not meeting those rules, and not being allowed, i remember that like. there was this other indoor playspace in the lower level and there were toys i wanted to play with but Refrained from, and it was like, why did 4 yr old me get the idea i Wasn't Really Allowed, and most of what i can theorize is that it was like, well other kids might want to play with that, and the Normal / Better kids should get priority lmao, and/or being nervous that it just might otherwise lead to some sort of Interaction i wouldn't feel ready for.....and d) sitting at a table with like whatever 4 or 5 other kids or something and amongst ourselves someone was like "oh put your foot in the middle if you're [x]" and i tried to join in on a technicality lmfao and also just in, you know, active efforts to be Participating with these other kids on their terms, and it did not pay off, something that repeated uhhhhh, forever i guess lol. insert that post like can allistic people be normal for 5 seconds.....

like in elementary school i wasn't really making friends either, incredibly, i was Amicably Tolerated by many people then & like, again also at any point after at least lmao (and it helps that i was generally in teachers' good graces, not that i narced on anyone ever, but i had like, my Niche as the Academically Successful One, and also i was the kid who draws, another shoutout to some post and tweet about how being The Drawing Kid was like, some measure of respect but also disdain lmfao...) and sometimes people would again like. choose to interact with me repeatedly, and i'd sort of be nonplussed at best b/c it's like, okay thanks but in this situation i didn't Choose this any more than i choose [Trying to be in the group but being rejected/excluded], so it's kinda weird, i was friends with someone for a few years in elementary school but we just were Coincidentally in the same class for those years, when we were in different classes in 3rd or 4th grade and just weren't seeing each other it fizzled out, in middle school i made another couple friends where we were all being Funny lmao, but i didn't go to high school, so once again we weren't seeing each other, and [At School] was where i always had most Interactions with people, didn't see people much outside of school even if we were hanging out / being friends During school, for [a whole tangent] reasons, so. guess the good news is i'm still in touch / friendly acquaintances with some people from school from college, but even then, there was Some more social success or whatever, but not all That much, and i was still unhappy like, not having many friends, often being like "i'm going to the cafe a block away b/c i have no social occasions here and i want to get out of the dorm / be around people," that if i was with more than one other person i could end up the third wheel friend lmao or nobody is paying attention when you talk or oh no i put myself out there hanging with a friend group but maybe people thought you were a joke or something, thanks. smh

and that like, speaking of college, i went early but this was, for my part, truly primarily driven like "well i hate school so if i can Not go to high school, okay" and like, while i got in and everything it was still like "tf is college, i've never known what i Want To Do so i wonder if i'll figure this out, but i'm not expecting to last past the first semester / year b/c this is college and i'm a terrible student actually lol" but then turns out i kept doing well enough like A's & B's like oh woops i guess i'm still here, then, hope i can figure out what tf "credit hours" means (finally did lol).....then sophomore year was a bunch of just Agonizing over "what tf do i major in," something i never figured out, wherein i might bring something up & it got parentally shot down like "never heard you talk about that" like what tf Did you hear me talk about? are you thinking i had my life figured out by age 9, b/c i didn't think that, i'm only 15/16 even Now, even being the Regular college age it's like, nobody's figuring their life out then. also i didn't tell my parents things, so. and then i settle on something that sure, Might've been of interest, but also it was like, a) a program that barely existed and req'd taking classes at a like 30 min away campus and also the head of department had Just retired and the most heinous teacher in the related fields was now in charge, brilliant and b) the sort of thing you'd just wanna start taking prerequisites for like as soon as you set foot on campus, like, great. and c) i was like, hardly feeling all the Academic Ambition anyway b/c i never had, b/c i hate/d school, and b/c i still didn't Know what i wanted to major in, and i was stressed n depressed and also realizing oh right, i'm not cishet, and oh right, i'm never going to get along with my family b/c [long tangent] reasons and that's kind of concerning, here i am impending Being 18 and like, how do i get out of this b/c it's becoming clearer that i'm not just gonna start getting along with the 'rents now that i'm not an elementary schooler and also now that i'm realizing the Reasons being at home sucks. guess i learned stuff in college lol but also it was like, the experience of getting to be Away From Home and existing every day without parents literally / figuratively over my shoulder at some point every day, and getting to do shit on my own and figure things out while Not At Home.....i also had a lot of fun taking a couple classes from this one music prof lol. he was this weird really enthusiastic and really knowledgeable guy lmao like great, these evening classes where we go over to the arts building and he plays things on the piano off the cuff and tells a lot of tangential stories while we're learning about like, beethoven technically, or folk music. didn't need those classes but they were great, i've had these teachers who were totally into whatever they were teaching and had a great time with that

also acknowledgment to the fact i was a No Extracurriculars person all through school, k thru 6 and college alike really, although i took dance class for that k thru 6 period, just that was separate from school actually (and another fun "being away from home" thing and Theatresque performance thing i enjoyed) but besides that it was like, how do i figure out what i want to do without committing to joining this whole thing, i don't know How to sign up for stuff really either, and it'd probably entail "asking for stuff" and needing to coordinate more rides and etc and that's just a hassle, and i wanna go home from school asap anyways, and then like, when it came to college, i was again at first thinking like "well idk what i'm doing and i hate homework so i'll probably mess it up in this first year anyways" and figured that doing anything Extra outside classes was just gonna be too much, and also, it's like, i've never been in these kinds of groups before and why am i gonna start in college, where there'll probably be all these people who Have done this stuff before, and are also 18? e.g. even though it was like "hey you're away from home and don't have to ask/tell anyone else anything to do this club stuff or whatever!" supposed ideal environment for trying stuff out, it was like, maybe i'm theoretically interested in auditioning for the fall theatre production, but the last acting experience i had was like, "2 month drama class in middle school" or "that 4th grade [section of a] play" so like, not really Any education or experience or Training re: any of that stuff, and a bunch of 18 yr olds who might've, or [age peers] who were theatre people who had already done stuff so they weren't getting Lead Roles or anything but they were getting cast / taking classes / joining an a capella group while i'm like right on, i'm over here with some sort of Grade Honor Society (??) saying my gpa qualifies me to join and be able to experience some further academic rigor/requirements lmfao and i'm like absolutely not. get away lol. anyways so bit of a chaotique Post K12 Zone Education Experience there lmfao, all kinds of things i'd Like to Learn and even take classes on, but didn't like, right i love learning languages but never took classes, love math and shit but only got to a certain level of calc and even then seemed to miss some Lore, never did anything re: theatre, etc and so on. so you wonder if some advantages re: high school would be like, more chances for those extracurriculars (or regular curriculars) but, as though i wouldn't have the same qualms about getting in on any of it, and as if i wouldn't've still hated school but also still been at home, F. and i think people can be a lot more normal to each other when it's college and you're Not stuck in one building together 8 hours a day lmao, got some gentle "occasional Bullying style attention" in middle school, but had juuust enough like, [that Niche of good grades / kid who draws] and people who Were friendlier to me that it was you know, unpleasant, but didn't have to be that huge a deal, and then i was outta there soon enough. also, in college many people are 18 or older, as opposed to 11 to 13. anyways the rest of my school story was that in the end the problems were "i don't know what i want to major in and also now's a worse time than ever b/c i've realized my existence At Home is untenable, and naturally i am quite depressed & stressed about things, and i gotta say absolutely virtually every adult presence was either totally unhelpful to Counterproductive here lmao, like, not much anyone could do really but it's helpful when someone is like, i'll treat you like a person vs simply just going 'uh why are you not doing the academic stuff good enough'" lmfao like. the whole time Not having friends i'd wanna talk to through class and happening to get good grades in part b/c i somehow Could as easily as i did and also i was afraid of getting C's or worse b/c "tfw i wasn't even yet in a grade that gave you A thru F grades yet but my older sister caught shit for getting a C

like :/" and etc means adults are like My Student Is Fine, and also, what are you gonna do even if they aren't, i guess. i just had to figure out completely for myself Why and How i really wasn't Fine and that was quite difficult and also took a long time. then there was a mutual prank of "i drop out of college at the tail end of things" and "now i have to be at home with parent/s more resentful of your obvious Waywardness (insert: not being cishet, and the fact it occurs to me that my being autistic was always causing 'problem' behavior i was getting shit for like, the whole time lmfao, even if nobody knew / labeled it like oh this is for ND reasons, or if it was both true i tried to come out (smh, thought i Had to b/c that was part of Not Being Cishet) and it was simply ignored / unaddressed and yet it sure fueled further specific resentment of my not Performing Gender properly, or "worse," so that went well, in that i eventually abruptly left and did not maintain contact, in the interest of "the levels to which i was thriving was like, that if i bailed and like died 50 hrs later it'd still be what i want to do," true to that i did not / don't regret it. and what do you know, i was first able to bail to a relatively nearby friend from college's home, whose family also liked me lmao. shoutout to school still being where i made Any friends, except a friend i made who was a coworker of several years. and Online Friends, which, another school connection, that like, i can more readily Connect w/people via talking about interests, something that happened Sometimes at school in person lmao but not much, but also that i Talk About Interests in a way through Drawing, which, well shoutout to doodling in the margins of papers throughout school lmfao, it didn't hurt! that's my saga.

oh and that footnote, i also really enjoyed the "in middle school you either take language classes or 4 Electives you rotate through each year" and those electives sure featured some more varied and hands on activities i had a great time with. shoutout to like, cooking, and to shop class, my Car Designs were great apparently, idk how. shoutout to my Intuition re: engineering or something lmaoo.....very fun to just end the schoolday in that big garage space where you could actually open that garage door right to where all the buses were, beautiful. Oh, and that's another footnote, when my last class of the day in 8th grade was english, i'd sometimes finish work early and my teacher would let me go to our spacious library, with the v nice librarian who'd recommend books to me she thought should be checked out more often b/c she knew i liked to read that much, and also just generally had teachers / other adult staff kinda wandering in at the end of the day, talk about "i don't really relate to other ppl my age" where i did generally prefer to be around adults, so that was fun. oh and also shoutout to hating school lmao wherein during like, middle school when the schoolday started at like 7:30am or smthing disgusting and i just learned to like, view whatever time it was in a "at least it's almost [x]" like well okay, first period is math and that kinda sucks but at least once it's over this hardest part of the day will be over, then next class is kinda more chill at least, and then it'll be the last period before lunch, etc etc etc where i could sort of keep up that stamina like telling myself at any point it was Almost [a more encouraging time of day] lmao like. kinda fucked up to have to be dragging yourself through the weekdays like that, but

Oh! goddamn and i didn't even get into that if i ever got in ~trouble~ in elementary school it was stuff like Not Paying Attention, but where half the time that might be some other kid beside me messing around lmfao and i'm not gonna be like "uhhh follow the rules!!!" (and that even when i was In Trouble like go sit in the chair where you have to be quiet there for like 10 min i might say something to some other kid in that zone and they'd be like "um it's the quiet chair you have to be quiet!!" or "uh we're getting into the next lesson and you have to put that book back asap" like wow these other kids are dweebs about Rules lmfao) and there'd just be times like, it's 1st grade and i know how to read pretty well already but we're going over the alphabet like stoppp i know the Phonics already........or the ways ND people can kind of Intuit some stuff more successfully, like in third grade learning multiplication i neverrrrr studied but just broke it down like, okay i remember the Fives b/c of telling time, i know the 2x table and stuff, i know the commutative property, if we're all the way at the 8x and i haven't Memorized stuff, i can still like, break it down to say, [5 x 8] + [8 x 2] or something when i see 8 x 7, even if it takes a second lmfao.......and stuff like the tragedy of when i Did make a friend in like, 2nd grade, who i think we didn't even talk to each other ever?? i was playing legos or smthing by myself once during Indoor Recess and she just started playing agreeably along with me, aka someone socializing on My Terms apparently as our Introduction, and we just were friends past that but one time, not even during a Lesson Session, we were messing around quietly making each other laugh as the incredibly important process of "put papers in your folders" was going on, and since we were Not Paying Attention for some reason the teacher made a whole example of it where i had to carry my desk across the classroom for the Shaming Element of it and also so that i had to permanently sit way further from that friend, so that was kind of discouragement re: interacting at all. thank you to that teacher, who'd later once Gesticulate to me from across the gym that i should put my arms down at my sides rather than being crossed (we were rehearsing some class performance) & i had no idea what she was trying to convey, so afterwards she told me i had to have Reduced Recess Time or some shit because of Ignoring her instead of putting my arms down lmfao. and i was irritated at having been misinterpreted / my Intentions dictated to me and punished like that, but i was also used to it from adults lmfao and did not bother explaining myself lol like yeah god forbid i left my arms crossed on purpose and now i have to read some more during recess. tl;dr school has so much nonsense & i def had some Times re: being autistic & also just being someone who hated school forever lmao, think it was Also 2nd grade where one arbitrary sunday night i just cried out of frustration at having to go back for another normal school week. classic. oh and that also, while i wasn't like "oooo booksmart people who hate not having a Definitive Correct Answer to things &/or ohhh autistic ppl So Good at math, in a way everyone hates and disrespects, but they suck at Literature/Arts which requires you to reflect on humanity and shit," like, not only was i the drawing kid but i was also apparently ahead of the curve as it were at like, Literary Analysis lmfao where there was a few times in elementary school i'd be the kid providing the Interpretation like "what's this poem about / what's the theme or Symbolism in this story," but from elementary school to college it's like, for god's sake don't ask me to come up with a story / work with some really open ended prompt, i don't Invent in that way, and when i try to draw on Inspiration i'll get stuck on some specific source and be unable to do anything but just rip it off really lmao. but then again i was prolific in "it's 1st grade and you write and illustrate a little short story or smthing in these booklets

that we then have a simple little binding process for" like ohhh fancy, i got a tootsie roll lollipop at Awards Time for writing a shit ton of those lol. but that's like, when you're too young to have that much of a Creative Process anyways lmao. but then, my older sister, whose Thing was writing, has an incredible 2 Volume like, noir mystery saga from those elementary school times, it's a classic lmao. anyways once again so much to say about School lol closing the door after meandering on that one for this long lol

April 6th: Are you able to drive? If so, was it difficult to learn? What was difficult about it? If not, do you use any alternatives?

i did learn to drive, tbh just universally it's like, at any point you're driving there's A Lot to pay attention to at once, even if you think you're Good At That or whatever, which i sure don't think i always am lol, and it's pretty wild we just, you know, let everyone go around as fast as they want in machines that can kill you or someone else, and this is also Unnecessary b/c like, let's have accessible & reliable public transit so that everyone can travel without Needing to have a car / someone else who will drive them. i didn't think i had too much trouble learning to drive, but it had to help that i just took it very seriously from the start lmao like, well, i'm quite aware i could kill someone with this. the driving classes i took were alright, i remember the instructor being pretty chill and friendly lol. rip to the fact i could be tense when driving with parent/s, when driving a manual i'd always like screech the tires when accelerating out of a Stop, until all at once it was like "and i'm driving that manual car alone on a road trip & wouldn't you know it, only literally once did i have that issue of not getting out of a stop smoothly enough" lmao like the Anxiety......really like yeah i had an alright time learning and think i'm solid enough at driving / like doing it, theoretically, but Driving Is Wild just in general and let's have that public transit

April 7th: How are you with sarcasm and/or metaphors/figures of speech? Do you interpret things very literally?

i think i Usually get what people mean with these Devices but i can't really say lol, but anytime you know, someone is being more Implicit in what they say, plenty of times i can infer one implication and only later realize they probably meant a different one, or yknow, i make whatever initial inference i make and can be stuck like "???" and have to like, mentally run diagrams about the interaction lol......meanwhile i'm not always remembering that like, if i'm shifting context mentally that's necessarily able to be inferred by whoever i'm talking to lol, whether it's about getting into some adjacent topic or like, i don't think it tends to be very clear even in person when i've started being sarcastic lmao, like i know that can be true for anyone but it's like well, guess i gotta make it clearer i'm doing a bit......flipside of that or something lmao that people are more Obvious than they think they are sometimes about like, idk, when someone is sort of making some sarcastic remark to you but the sarcasm is also sort of only to themself, aka just like okay i know you mean this more dismissively / disparagingly than re: what you're saying just at face value lol like. just always fun >:/

[gg-astrology]

hiii!! i'm that hannah montana but seokjin agenda anon, tell hi to your friend!! the lvl of my satisfaction is impossible to describe, thank you for your service. and yes, you've fulfilled my request!! i really appreciate your efforts, it was on point!! can i request more bangtan things?? only if it's alright with you :| can you do the same ranking for them from ' i'm rich 3$, wine and dine me' to 'i have a rolled blanket as my pillow' *cough* jk *cough*. from that to a simpler lifestyle? thk!

Hey there!! 💕❤️💕 Welcome back!!! 💕❤️💕💕❤️💕 slkskjnsdkjns she saw this and im really glad u like it!! 💕❤️💕💕❤️💕 

U can! 💕❤️💕Me and my friend really like your questions because it’s very thoughtful and fun!! 💕❤️💕 

EDIT: My friend said they interpreted this question differently into ‘how complex vs simple’ their lifestyle is and!!!!!!!!!! maybe we’ll edit and add it in anon if u send in another ask I’ll ask my friend if they want to answer?? I’m sorry!!!!! My 2nd house sun immediately: Wealth  

Please send us more questions, but maybe not this one bc it’s about their personal lifestyle/how they live (+ not their personalities or what they’ve shown us) and it may be treading on 1. making assumptions about their personal life in which we’re in no authoritative position to commentate on  

2. we can obviously talk about how we view them and write commentaries on how we feel/what we think, but there’s also a line where we have to acknowledge people might see us as credible information/authority in our own rights when it’s out in public/shared to an audience 

3. what they’ve shown us clear boundaries between public figures and their audience might be wiser 

4. acknowledging our position of power + influence to the community rather than ignoring the fact that our words have sway will help us in the long-run by making conscious, thoughtful choices on what we could give/bring to the fan/outside community as well. 

I hope this makes sense?? 💕❤️💕 I hope it’s ok if I mulled it over last night and thought I might not – it might not be the best idea to talk about it/put it out there?? 

Please don’t feel bad at all!! 💕❤️💕I really love your questions and I actually wrote as I tried to figure out how to do this (literally just disclaimers before I realized oh maybe there’s no way to do this properly and I shouldn’t??) – I don’t want you to get out of this ask empty-handed, so if it makes it any better – I’ll publish my working through below the read more and you might see what I was working out as I try to answer your question?? 💕❤️💕 

Long commentary on BTS privilege, social inequality + wealth disparities in the real world (disclaimer for this ask?)  +  Working Outs and Why It Didn’t Work ⬇️

Note: From here on below is me writing my thoughts down as I tried to answer the ask, I hope that – even though I couldn’t answer your question – this is a good answer in other regards either way? Hopefully? 

Just a disclaimer note on BTS and this topic as well: In my head I’m immediately going into commentary about social inequality, wealth disparity and how poverty + classism exists in real life. 

Just a quick tangent, but real people suffer from this issue. Our society have consequences when it comes to wealth inequality + the ability to afford basic human amenities (healthcare, living/housing, food, education, transportation, disabilities etc.) 

Even when they’re relatable, BTS are billionaires who knows their position is privileged. Lets - make that clear for a second.  

They still do their best in variety shows where they have to compete/entertain the audience. What I’m trying to say is. I’d rather not ignore/make note that there’s a difference between being privileged, being aware of these issues and still preferring simpler lifestyles for themselves. Than being ignorant and completely insensitive/unaffected from the matter. They’re still privileged, let’s make that clear. And thus, as relatable as they are to the public/audience, they benefit from the social/economical/political power they have given by those around them (their audience, accessibility medias and production).  

In the context that is related (i.e. army joking that BTS fights over ramen) – BTS have never once shown that they’re unaware of their wealth + privilege, even it was a joke – the thing that is missing is the context –  they’re usually seen competing in BTS run/gayo, but it’s produced to let them showcase their dynamic and chemistry  - the prize (commodities/money) was never actually the main focus. 

A highly competitive game with members who know each other well - is actually what these shows are about. 

BTS doesn’t glorify their own wealth, nor have they acted as if they are poor in order to gain relatability or sympathy from the audience/masses (looking at armis 💜 who does this. delete armi 💜) 

It’s a part of why they have fans and why people like them. They’re able to sell products + contribute to relief/charity organizations and advocate campaigns.  Whilst they are in position of privilege compared to others - they’ve never not acknowledged that they could afford to do so for reasonable personal requests (i.e. safety on flights and in airports, security in their home, equipments to perform/produce with, reaching out to audiences that usually never has the opportunity to connect with them despite liking them for a long time, etc.)

I think it’s just important to note - for those who are armys and those who are looking at it from the outside - that this is what we see and why we’re talking about this. 

I just want us to acknowledge that they’re privileged and their lifestyle choices are personal, I think that’s what I’m doing here. 

So, commentary on social inequality of the world we all live in + BTS privilege in all this/disparities. check.

This is going to be disgustingly generalized to an incredible amount because we don’t have houses – to be completely honest, within the context of the question having houses is exactly what we need for these types of answers. 

From a technical stand-point, not having houses when we’re talking about specific contexts within a person’s life (basically why we have so many houses - for different contexts) – will make this reading terribly vague and misleading as well. 

Actually, should we do this at all.. because simply saying oh Taurus/Libra placements would want materialistic things to show x, y, z is incredibly misgiving and is like a blanket statement. Without houses in question, there’s no specification on what it is used for or what kind, or what type of actions/manifestations these signs are going to have in order to express themselves.  

Planets in signs can only do so much to talk about the energy that is being produced – placing them in houses and context, gives them manifestation that doesn’t simply exist in a vacuum by itself.

All placements in a chart make up a cohesive picture of what it is used for, when and where. With only the how/why (placements) — the best I can probably do to answer the question is just explain how it could possibly manifest and why/what reasoning it may have to express itself that way.

While that is something I could? probably talk about. It… just doesn’t answer the question in a way that’s satisfying. This question is really good… and there’s a way to get there and give it the answer it wants. But.. with what we have, it’s a disservice to answer half-right and do a poor job overall, than to actually give the full answer.

Hnnnfghfnhgn there’s also.. some disclaimers on personal life for idols/public figures and how this might.. be almost assuming or intruding on that territory? From a glance it isn’t like it’s not something they’ve not shown us publicly or told us about. But they also didn’t advertise it, and what they do with their personal life/lifestyle– is that something we (as fan) are in anyway, shape or form, capable or have any voice to talk about as if we know what they’re doing? Does that? make sense? 

Like, intruding as in - do we have any authority to tell them to get a pillow or stop drinking wine or something like that. Speculate, on what restaurant they go to/how $$$ it is, or does things that are privileged, things that aren’t going to han river to bike, etc. Can we really pick and choose certain choices they choose to do with their lifestyle, while being completely separated from reality of their other?

Idk.. this is getting complicated.. but maybe sticking to things they are proud of and does talk about openly/happily in their public and professional persona might be better… considering that they should have? a modicum of personal life back to themselves? we could at least do that and choose to respect them right… thats? hm. what’s right.

Fine wine and dine, lavish restaurants and other personal choices on their expenses and love for/lifestyle… maybe.. its for the best if we leave it to their own authority and discretion, over their own private/personal life and what they choose to share with people they know/care for/love. 

I think the end all of it might just be: can I imagine them coming to say to us “army, you know how I am right? I’m like this in my personal lifestyle/choice” – and of what they could say, I don’t think that’s something they may be willing to share without their explicit consent, nor can I imagine it right now if it’s about messy habits or a flaw they may have. So hm. 

The question addresses simpler lifestyle too – we don’t have authority to commentate on JK’s pillow choices, but being exposed like that suddenly might not be something he’s entirely comfortable with or would advertise to others as well? Not to mention, they all seem to not advertise anything that is outrageously privileged that would smack anyone in the face – they’re pretty sensitive to keeping things personal, private, under-wraps. Even when they choose to eat at a well-known restaurant, it’s not in bad-taste or done frivolously. In a way, they all tend to keep a simpler lifestyle about them to not let their wealth + privilege get in the way of their work + connecting to us, focusing solely on what their skills are + performance and music. 

Simply going by that.. is it wise to talk about something we might just choose to show decency/a modicum of respect for the idol’s privacy maybe.. uhhdfjgnn i!!!!!!!!! there’s thoughts and feelings and im just trying to let it out so it makes sense and then i can navigate between it and see what i can do/the right way to talk about it (if it exists)!!

God.. I guess there’s.. no way I can possibly do this?? Considering if I think about it from all sides – I can’t approach it technically, without houses. I literally can’t answer this question, it isn’t about choice because answering this question is directly asking about the houses. So I literally can’t answer correctly. I also can’t – or well, I don’t think the moral issue is ok here when I think further on it. Consequences are inevitable with all posts/production, but optimizing it so that it affects people positively and minimize damage to others is always something to check through. This may not be a good idea, just to do. So maybe not. 

Hhndndhnndf ok,,, gotta,,, write something for the introduction so it makes sense.

Note: I did go through this, edit and write some additional paragraphs to make it make sense. But I hope this? gives you insight or some thoughts to my working process and what I consider/go through when I make these posts as well? Thank u for ur time, I hope it isn’t too disappointing ;;  let me know what u think/how u feel anon I’m sorry I couldn’t do this question but please let me know if you’re ok or not!!!! 💕❤️💕💕❤️💕

[sartorialatlantan]

Silver Lining and A Brief Backstory

Whether you’re an optimist or not, anyone, even if only in hindsight, can see the silver lining of a bad situation, circumstance or series of events. When I was 20 years old I ended a three-year relationship with my first serious girlfriend. We had met at 17 or so and it was your classic teenage love story. We were young and foolish and led by a shared faith in evangelical Christianity that I would eventually and happily abandon. We had convinced each other and ourselves that it was ordained by god that we came together and that when the time was right we would get married. To add insult to injury we told nearly everyone we knew about our plans at all of 18 years old, so naturally the sting of embarrassment came with the sting of separation. I don’t need to, nor do I care to go into details of our breakup or what brought it about, but this tiny bit of back-story is crucial to understand the silver lining that would follow. Now that I’m saying it out loud, to call what followed a silver lining doesn’t even really cut the mustard, what followed was the absolute best thing that’s ever happened to me.

It’s safe to assume that anyone reading this has been through a breakup, maybe even safe to assume a bad one or two. We all know how down in the dumps, miserable and depressed and isolated and totally alone you feel when you separate from someone you were literally saying, “I love you” to not one day ago. It’s an awful place to be, whether you’re 20 or 35 or 50 etc. it’s just plain awful. And I imagine it’s existentially worse the older you get because of the looming fear that you’ll be too old to meet someone else before the clock stops. While that may be true at 78, the irrational brain of an 18 or 20 year old will tell them the same thing. So in the wake of my adolescent breakup I drank, a lot. I took up smoking and heavy drinking and gave up on the idea of partnering with someone ever again. Some of this ridiculous thinking goes back to the Christian thing, and apologies now if you take offense so some of what I say about that faith. When you’re 20, and for the last 3-4 to years you not only thought, but believed at your bible thumping core that you were paired with someone else by gods own hand and it ends, well to put it plainly you A. start doubting that there even is a god or B. find it impossible to understand why god would start something and end it. Now in hindsight, it’s really a mixture of A and B and I also now realize that if god is real, his most famous creation to date (us) has a beginning and an ending. It’s also very easy to religiously rationalize everything to fit your made up narrative, kind of like biblically cherry picking in reverse.

I’m not going to go into my exiting the church and Christian faith altogether, that would be too far removed from the topic at hand, but I will say that when I left it, and truly let go of it mentally, it was the most calming and freeing feeling I had had at that point. All it took was squarely asking myself, practically in a mirror, “do your really believe in this, do you REALLY believe in ANY of this?” When I answered “no” I felt a combination of grief and relief; on the one hand I was letting go of what had been the norm to that point and on the other I was free from what rabbi’s refer too as “a wrestling match with god”, and that freedom felt better than any made-up wave of holy spirit baptism ever had. Bottom line, if you’re an evangelical and truly believe that you have a private, gibberish love language with god, don’t mock what the Mormons believe, it’s just as ridiculous. I knew too many Christians in those days who couldn’t see that irony. Some still can’t.

Now back to the story. There I was broken hearted and feeling like life was over at 20, it was time to grow a beard and become a wandering nomad. Maybe I’ll get a motorcycle and seek out an outlaw gang and just ride til' I die. Maybe I’ll head up the east coast and get a job on a boat out of New England. Really all of my ideas involved my look first, and occupation second. Anything involving hand tattoos and a long matted beard would’ve sufficed. But then, some time passed and I would eventually turn 21, which opened up a whole new world, the bar scene. Now, still in the throws of depression, single and not loving it, I proceeded to the bar scene with a new drinking friend named Will in the East Atlanta Village. We drank and socialized all over the village, almost every night too, to excess. We were not, living, laughing or loving as the girls touting faux happiness, post break-up say in their Facebook statuses. There was the Graveyard Tavern, a very large dive bar with something akin to a dance floor and a pool table area. Then the Glenwood that at the time had a horror/cult movie theme down to movie posters laminated under the tabletops. There was My Sisters Room and Mary’s, a lesbian bar and gay bar, separated by a side street and Grant Park Pizza. Then you came to the 5 Spot, which was a dive bar and punk music venue, then across the street from there was the Flatiron, which was the shape you’re picturing. It sat below 13 Roses Tattoo, which for that era in my opinion was the best shop in town. If you took a hard left from there you could walk up to The Earl, a dive bar with pretty damn good food and a solid standing room only music venue in back. And lastly across from there was The East Side Lounge, the perfect spot if you wanted to do cocaine while watching Predator 2 on the TV over the bar. I never did cocaine, but everyone in town knew that’s where you went to score some, or to watch Predator 2 while drinking $2 PBR on draught.

This little village was our spot for nearly a full calendar year, Will and I rarely took anyone else along, because no on else was as equally miserable as us and who needs positive company when you’re binging cheap beer pitchers and smoking a whole pack of cigarettes in one night? Now, to be clear, it was always to the two of us but we were making the attempt, occasionally, to meet women. 20 something, tattooed, smoking, drinking, most likely cocaine doing, women who were 100% not interested; we were suburb boys and you could practically smell it on us, and these were city chicks, with sleeve tattoos, hidden piercings and a palpable hate for their fathers. Maybe I’m adding that last part for effect, but you get the idea. Now that said, in that time span I did manage to meet and get to know a girl or two, I think Will did too but nothing ever really stuck.

Now I’m going to back up, but keep in mind this was all happening by night, most nights of the week, but by day I was still working at the same place I am now, didn’t love it then still not crazy about it today, but that’s a whole other topic. Some days after work, before Will and I would venture to East Atlanta I would go meet up with this piano player I had been introduced to by a former band mate who needed a guitar player capable of on-the-fly melodic riffs to accent his songs. In the band I had been in before, that was literally all I did, so we were a good fit. He would play his latest song for me a few times through headphones and then I’d start “noodling” as they say until I landed on some solid melodic hooks to overlay on what he had already recorded. We had a solid system, and he paid me in pizza and beer and we could smoke cigarettes in the studio. Just for a brief tangent, you have to smoke inside in these situations. If you and your fellow musicians are trying to accomplish something in the studio, but you’re walking outside every 20 minutes to have a dart you’ll never get anything done. So I would listen and noodle and drink and smoke and eventually eat. Once I tapped into a riff he liked we’d build on it together, shape it, shorten it, lengthen it, whatever it needed, then we’d lay it down and repeat. This was a regular thing for me a couple times a week. It went like this, get up, go to work, leave, go home grab my gear, head to the garage studio, record, smoke, eat, drink, leave, drop off the gear, grab Will, and be in the Village by 10pm or so. Then we’d stay til' last call, go home, shower, sleep, wake up, repeat. If you’re doing the math, yes I was driving most of the time, it was stupid and reckless and I’m not proud of it and it was over a decade ago lets just leave it at that and drop it. There’s no one to make amends to for anything from those days, other than a few girls that I probably drunkenly intimidated buy hitting on them too much. Anyways, this was the pattern for the better part of 20 to 21. Now, cut back to my Jesus-y girlfriend from the beginning of the story. To the best of my knowledge she was off in a new circle of friends, living and laughing and loving and meeting new people and I knew for a fact she was dating around. Through this new circle of friends she would eventually meet Kristen, and if you know me, then you know my wife’s name is Kristen, yes the very same Kristen. Kristen was 26 at the time, recently divorced from a total dipshit, we’ll leave it at that, and she too was socializing with a new circle of friends.

To help you keep up with the wild web of who begat who, at this point in time, if I hadn’t separated with my girlfriend when I did a year prior, she wouldn’t have started dating who she did and met the string of people who would eventually introduce her to Kristen, my wife today. Now, for her privacy I won’t name my high school girlfriend so for the story we’ll call her Jane. Jane and Kristen and a large circle of churchy band kids all became friends, though only briefly. Kristen being newly single was introduced to some guys via this circle and Jane specifically introduced her to guy named Steven, possibly to date, though I don’t think they ever did. That said, Kristen and Steven formed a friendship and Kristen soon after parted ways with Jane and the churchy band kids because they were all just A. a little too Jesus-y and B. more than immature to say the least. Now I was peripherally aware of a lot of this via Facebook, doing the creepy ex thing. I didn’t know Kristen, but I had seen her in some photos and she had a killer Audrey Hepburn ribcage tattoo, still does obviously.

So, Kristen and Steven are friendly and attend some of the same bars and house parties and she’s out in the world dating and doing her thing. Kristen would eventually meet Steven’s newest girlfriend, Amy. Amy and Kristen became fast friends and were practically joined at the hip. Kristen and Amy were partying, dive bar hopping, nightclub dancing best friends. Meanwhile, just to take you back to my reality at the same time, I was grumpy binge drinking with Will somewhere in the East Atlanta Village. Now, here’s where it gets fun. Amy has a brother named Chad, who at that time was in a band, Chad worked at a little café/bar with a certain piano player, yes, you guessed it, the one I was working with that year. Now through this maze of people Kristen would eventually meet the same piano player and it would be an understatment to say she was into him. One night I’m in the studio with him and we’re sort of half working, half chatting and he starts telling me about this girl he’s kind of seeing and her Audrey Hepburn tattoo. It was one of those small world funny moments, because I knew who he was talking about from my Facebook stalking, and I knew she was hot, no naturally I was envious. Some time later, he would invite me and Will and Kristen and Amy to watch a band play at the previously mentioned Earl in the East Atlanta Village, I knew it well. This is where I would meet Kristen and where our relationship would ultimately begin. I could write another 6 dozen paragraphs on our early dating relationship and how it all went and maybe I will at some point, but the point of this very long-winded essay is about the silver linings of a bad situation. Now to call this love story and how I would eventually meet my wife that I would have two beautiful and amazing daughters with a silver lining to a high school breakup would be borderline insulting. But realize, at 21, now nearly 22, I was still miserable and alone and thought I would be forever. Then along comes Kristen. Now to recap, I split with Jane, became a miserable person while Kristen was divorcing her first husband from college that she really only married to piss off her parents. Kristen would eventually meet Jane, who would introduce her to Steven, who introduced her to Amy who introduced her to the piano player, who she was infatuated with for a brief moment, who introduced her to me. We’re separated by 6 years in terms of age, come from completely different backgrounds and other than this small cluster of people, had no one in common between us. In a very long-winded, round about way, I owe my heartbreaking high school girlfriend a thank you. I had to experience a terrible breakup, the kind where you don’t ever talk again, go through a shitty, drunken, depressing year and ultimately give up on having any semblance of a happy life to meet my wife, and everything changed after that. I didn’t go to college, I had a small circle of friends and most of them avoided the city. It took this wild culmination of events and people I’ve never met to bring Kristen and I together.

You might be saying that story’s not all that compelling, things like that happen all the time, and you’re not entirely wrong, but that said, I still think there’s something special about it.

The year 2020 has shown me a lot about myself. Once quarantine started I quickly learned how unimportant clothes were. Take a moment to catch your breath. I still love tailoring and will absolutely wear dress clothes again, but when you’re staring down a pandemic, drape and tie space just become less of a concern and are quickly replaced with stocking up of frozen goods and day drinking. I’ve spent the majority of 2020 in Vans and golf polo’s, and I don’t hate it. In this time I’ve found a new passion for the game of golf, I’ve cooked new things, in the early days of lock down I got creative with my photography in ways that wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been home all day. I don’t think any of us knows when this nonsense will be over, 2020 might be entirely wrapped in Covid and it might even bleed into 2021, and by then, most of the world might’ve had it. I know that I don’t want it, and if I am to get it I hope to the god I don’t believe in that it’s mild.

When your 6 year old asks if you’re going to be alive when they’re a grown up in the middle of a pandemic it stings, because the reality is I can’t promise her I’ll be alive tomorrow, let alone 20 years from now, so I lie. And when you lie like that to a child you lie big, I tell her I’ll always be alive, that way we snuff out all worry in her little 6-year-old mind, because those wheels are constantly turning. I was burdened with the reality of death at 4 years old, seeing my 19-year-old cousin dead in a coffin after a motorcycle accident. I will shield the reality of death from my kids as long as possible. Life’s stressful enough already, no reason to start the trauma early. I blame that funeral at 4 almost entirely on my hypochondria. I’m that guy, who feels a leg pain and assumes it’s a blood clot bound for my heart. A pain or weird feeling in my side must be cancer. Naturally the rise of Covid has not been kind to this sick part of my brain. As I write I feel funny, the way you feel when you sleep too long and your limbs feel numb, I’m also hoarse from over doing it with a vaporizer recently trying to relax with a little THC. So naturally the weird feelings and throat tickle are Covid in my mind. If you don’t have anxiety, count yourself lucky.

The thing I keep trying to remind myself of is that it won’t last forever. Time literally fixes everything. It took time to get over being broken up with at 20 and even more time for the stars to align and bring Kristen and I together. It will take time for Covid to sweep the world and end and time further still for the powers that be to develop a safe vaccine. It will take time for society to feel comfortable going out mask-less again; it will take time for supermarkets to feel safe enough to take down all the plexi-glass at the checkout. It will all take time and in the end, if we’re lucky, we’ll see the silver linings that came out of it. New interests, new jobs, new relationships, etc. If I hadn’t found my passion for menswear I would not have eventually reignited my passion for photography. If the quarantine hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have done all the self-portraits I did that ultimately inspired a Hunter S. Thompson theme that lead to my newfound love and interest in golf. The new interest in golf led to new ways to spend time and bond with my in laws and my own family. It’s also the first form of physical activity I’ve done in nearly a decade; all good things.

The only thing I’ve never really been able to draw a connect-the-dots of positively around is my job. I’ve done the same thing for 13 years and I’ve never liked it. It has afforded me the opportunity to do things at times, and the schedule has always been flexible around my personally needs, but I’ve never really liked being here. As I write I’m sitting in an office that I’d rather not be in. If I were single and not a parent I would've left long ago. But the stability of this place and the paycheck keep me here. I’d much rather be taking photos for brands, submitting to publications etc. but there’s way to much financial risk in that. The time for that kind of seat-of-your-pants living is in your 20’s, when you’re a renter with no kids. If I could take photos, write, travel, golf, eat and drink for a living you‘d never hear a complaint. Kristen and I often talk about what we’d do with millions to distract ourselves from what we don’t have, and the stress of the day. She works in a very unforgiving retail environment, more unforgiving now with a pandemic on the rise again in our state. I work in print, for my father. A dying industry with a parent as my superior, what could possibly go wrong? We get along 9 days out of 10, but day 10 is always noteworthy. We bend over backwards for our customers, though I don’ think they care. We once had a 20 years long client say they were thinking about switching to another printer, just to shake things up. This after 20 years of late shifts, miracle timing and total and complete ass kissing. That day I learned, that quality service only matters to a select few, the rest just want to see the bill.

So that’s 2020 so far, new interests popping up, old interests taking a back seat, looking to the past to see the greatness that came out of dark times, hoping the future is as bright as today is, compared to the depths of despair I found myself in at 20. Still thinking there is no god but hopeful for an afterlife of some kind, wondering if there is a god why he’s letting old people who literally hang his picture in their dining rooms suffocate from a wet market virus that our leadership dubbed a hoax in the beginning…I will not go on a political tangent... By the time 2020 wraps I hope to be alive and well, I hope that everyone I know is alive and well too. I hope that Kristen finally lands herself a job in UX, she graduated from her UX academy in March and so naturally the job market has been slim pickings. Beyond that, I hope to find myself doing something other than what I do now at some point. When I dwell for too long about how many hours of my life I’ve spent folding booklets for people who are ultimately going to throw them away I feel myself reaching for the bottle. Bottom line, things aren’t great now, but I hope they get better. The funny thing about that is, according to Buddhists, it’s the act of wanting something, which causes suffering in the first place. So maybe the answer for the shit storm we’re all in today lie’s in the Buddhist teachings. I’m not about to proselytize Buddhism, but what I do know is the first truth as they call it is basically, that “suffering exists” and the second truth is that “desires and ignorance cause the suffering”. So it could be a major over simplification for our current state of affairs, but maybe if we stop wanting a better today and just accept today for what it is, we’ll all suffer a little less. Because whether we’re here for it or not, the sun will rise again and set again. The earth will turn and everything that is happening today will happen again tomorrow. Time fixes everything, and we can’t control it. So pray, meditate, work, golf or buy a motorcycle and head to the nearest New England port and join a boat crew, there’s no telling what kind of crazy we’re all going to wake up to from one day to the next, so to end on a cliché, make the most of today and try focus on the positive, maybe the stars will align and when it all shakes loose, you’ll meet your Kristen.

[levucky]

al horford sleeper agent

—————

anyway by now ive told basically everyone i care about but i had a life changing experience over the weekend. n it sounds dumb as shit but i met a real life dude who was basically a clone of nick from franz. weird hours. guess this is a thread

before we start i want to say i havent thought about franz in weeks. theyve gone away on their own finally but really i think my old obsessions just get replaced every few years and maybe it was my hard work in therapy or my new obsession with rap or

maybe it was just a realization or me growing up and maturing or something but i dont even want to work on my favorite fanfics anymore or anything. it’s just odd. i think im changing

and i don’t think about how my former favorite band members are doing or worry about them or check their socials n it feels really good. but i know there probably is or probably will be a replacement

ok that was a tangent. if they were replaced by anything they were replaced by new friends and the NBA. so there’s the exposition of this story sorted

anyway back to the weekend. the sleeper agent invited me to lunch. and that was the catalyst. god people are being so loud in here let me go to the art library

anyway i just kind of realized "huh i guess there's more out there." i went to lunch n shit. WE went to lunch n shit. stopped caring so much about my math homework. let myself be dumb and in love

that’s a very human thing. lunch. he spilled his stupid chipotle burrito all over his stupid bright green celtics jacket

he’s from italy. never even stepped foot in a chipotle. immediately clowned himself. some world we live in

we hung out all weekend. we went to lunch like two more times and we went to dinner. there was this big threat of leaving looming over my head the whole time. i made him walk like a mile on crutches and i feel very bad about it

i don’t know what’s wrong with him. it’s somewhere between a basketball injury and a chronic disability. either way that just made me feel even more emotionally attached to him. i never saw him without the celtics jacket

it was so cold that weekend. or maybe i just didn’t bring the right jacket. if he were a gentleman he would have offered me the celtics jacket. i didnt even hug him goodbye

and then of course he went back home. theres a million girls all over his instagram comments all the time. theres nothing special about me. he doesn't want to talk. i wrote my ap psych notes in green yesterday bc i was so in love with that stupid celtics jacket

im a sixers fan. the sixers and the celtics have been rivals forever. it was about to be war, except i want to move to boston. but really i want to move to dc. i wish the whole world was philly. things would be less complicated

im in love with a celtics jacket. a celtics jacket. of all teams. and i cant even talk to my basketball friends about it because they think im dumb shit for falling for some celtics fan with a million girls all over his instagram comments all the time

im not like those girls. i don’t think im like those girls. but i definitely exactly am

i have an economics test in fifteen minutes. i think one day ill drown in the atlantic ocean.

the test wasnt that bad. i thought about writing this the entire time. i would just zone out and stare and think about the phrase ‘al horford sleeper agent’

because he has to be. why else would someone put a diehard sixers fan right in front of a diehard celtics fan who looks exactly like the guitarist of their middle school favorite band

in reality i should be calling him a celtics sleeper agent because the whole point is that al horford is a sleeper agent for the celtics. but i hate al horford so i guess it’s more funny to include him in the title

i mean how can one player change so drastically like that? al horford was benched for the first time since his rookie season, like, two weeks ago after being traded to the sixers. how does that happen? why *wouldn’t* he be playing badly so his old friends win the title?

al horford’s gotta be retiring in like, three years, tops. he’s working for the celtics, i know it. and my sleeper agent is trying to convert me to a celtics fan

i understand why people make jokes, though. it’s a very human thing to want to go home. al horford just wants to go home. he lived in boston for however many years let me look it up

god whatever it was only three years i thought it was like eleven that just ruined my point

back to the matter at hand though that’s all we’re trying to do. we all just want to feel at home. we’re all just these little things trying to connect somehow. sometimes we are more desperate than others

i think im pretty desperate right now. sometimes i sit in my bedroom and im like damn when do i get to go home? but im home

i didn’t even want to leave dc. it was all star break and there wasn’t even basketball on. so there i was, in basketball purgatory, wizards territory for some god forsaken reason, losing sleep over a celtics fan and not wanting to go home

and when i say i was losing sleep you better believe me. i was so excited to wake up in the morning that i didn’t want to fall asleep. i wanted to be awake forever, endless, running through the city

i’ll get there soon enough. it’ll be with different people. college, yknow. all that. but sometimes i feel like certain things can’t be replaced.

and im acting like a different person lately. im using my phone at red lights just so i can check for a message from the sleeper agent. it’s always one word responses

yes. ok. maybe. some shit like that. a haha every once in a while. he’s not interested and i should stop trying

and then, INEVITABLY, i send something stupid back, a photo of my hand on the wheel or something, and i get left on read

and i know im stupid for it. everyone i know is screaming at me “disco, you’re dumb shit” but i just want to believe for a minute that im loved, im special

I want to feel like someone out there cares about me that isn’t obligated to, yknow? my mom can say she loves me all she wants but it doesn’t feel as good as some italian celtics fan saying it

some hot italian celtics fan mind you

even if he wasn’t hot or italian it would be nice. and actually it would be better if he liked like, ANY other basketball team

except maybe the knicks

but whatever. main point: i know im dumb shit and should stop trying. but it feels good to feel like if i keep trying maybe i’ll be wanted

sleeper agent is just one of those people tho. he’s magnetic and everyone always wants to be around him. dumb as hell in the most charming way ever. my friends are still all making fun of me

i started crying in a pizza place the other night because even the CONCEPT of italy sent me over the edge. i need to stop before i

wait what’s the word

i need to stop before i immortalize him? no, no

i need to stop before i deify him. soon enough he’s going to be a new canonical character in my head and i’ll start making up legends and stories to myself

we barely knew each other. if i deify him i’ll start telling people he offered me the celtics jacket when it was cold out. he’ll become a perfect gentleman. and he wasnt. he was just some stupid hot italian boy in a bright green jacket

im not going to deify him. it won’t happen. but i love the color green. i always say i love yellow more but i think that’s passed. i wear a green ring on my right ring finger every day. im not going to deify him and i still hate the celtics

overall, the celtics are winning the rivalry. i don’t think the sixers have ever truly been “great,” at least outside of philly. maybe allen iverson. wilt chamberlain. dr j? theyve never had like, a dynasty. idk. i don’t think you’d be able to get a sixers jacket in italy.

it’s his birthday today. i should probably text him. i should probably stop thinking about him. that’s just dumb shit, disco youre better than this what happened to a little self confidence every now and again

sure lets say external validation isnt necessary but also i think that’s something the mindfulness crowd made up to sell more planners and tote bags in 2011. it feels good to be wanted

never waste all your time on it sure. know youre still worth it even when you have no friends and there are a million girls all over his instagram comments. but it does feel good to hear “goodness disco i like how much you like the philadelphia 76ers”

my friends are all making fun of me for being on some romeo and juliet shit because he’s literally from verona and he’s a celtics fan and im a sixers fan god damn it disco why does this always happen

i never even read romeo and juliet but i saw the dreamworks adaptation so i guess ive got the story relatively right i know they die in the end. the gnomes shatter into little pieces i think

anyway tangents aside the sixers won tonight. philly is lit up green. why the hell is philly lit up green? the eagles were done like three months ago and the flyers are orange. why is philly lit up green

oh god, he just snapped me. a zoomed in photo of himself with caption that says “76ers” with like five exclamation points

here we go again, everybody

wish me luck

[gayasianminimalist]

Dear Future Deanna,

You are about to go off to college, and afterwards starting your great big life. Therefore you may never see this message future Deanna. But I won’t lose hope because maybe you’ll have this with you without knowing it. Anyways, good luck in college, hope you make the most of it because you only get once chance in college. Make good choices, but at the same time take some risks or else you will forever regret not being bold. It’s okay if you make any mistakes because I’m sure you’ll learn from them and become better. And another thing future Deanna, live in the moment and don’t think too far ahead.

-Deanna Wong   June 1, 2015

Dear past Deanna,

Well 2 years later I managed to find this mini notebook and see what I wrote to myself awhile back. Past Deanna, I have certainly made some mistakes and done things I couldn’t imagine myself doing 2 years ago! I have met some of the most important people in my life these past couple years, especially this past school year. I hit the gym pretty often which is a very necessary thing in my life but I don’t exactly have access to a gym at the moment. I’ll make do this summer with @ home exercises and probably running in the mornings hopefully starting tomorrow. I  kind of hit a big wall at the end of my 1st year at UCSD, I failed 2 classes and passed with a B and I’m waiting to take the other class still. My gpa definitely tanked but now I have above a 3.0 again which is my goal gpa to maintain for the rest of my years here. I see my handwriting hasn’t changed too much so I’ve reached my max as far as writing legibility. I’m cleaning out my desk right now and there are definitely a lot of old Deanna history hidden in these drawings. Hmm so I’ve left my college journal at school, but I only wrote in it probably twice this whole school year. Way to keep record of what’s happening. So something that has definitely changed my life was starting my rave life. EDM really has had an impact on me and I decided to give ecstasy a go. It is quite the euphoria, but in great moderation. Gave me the happiest feeling in the world. I’m so glad my friends have been gracious enough to let me have this experience. So I’m not saying drugs are good, but they’re sure really fun. This past spring quarter I tried shrooms and that trip definitely gave me one of the weirdest days of my life. Everything just felt sort of off, but I saw everything a bit differently visually. And then more often than not I had those nights of being drunk, stoned, or crossed af. Like I knocked out pretty hard on some nights. Next year I definitely need some self control over these type of nights. IDK if my body can handle such tough treatment anymore. Anyways I joined a frat, and now I have 2 littles in my frat. They’re super cool but I need to find a way to connect all of us next year because they’re kinda polar opposites. I don’t wanna think about this too hard though so I’ll just continue on this much needed spheal. Also an update on my love life: non-existent. I’ve been single for a solid 20 years since I’ve been alive. Also I’m 20 what... how dis happen. Going off on a tangent, I think I have found that photos are very important to me. All the memories I have captured, I can’t even begin with how blessed I feel forever with such great memories. I would say my second year of college was definitely better than my first year. I wanna stop here past Deanna since I’ve given you the gist of my college thus far. Now to write to future Deanna again.

-Deanna Wong    July 12, 2017

Dear Future Deanna, 

So what past Deanna said, keep living in the moment, take lots of pictures, and make more new friends, but remember to keep your old ones. Maybe try dating someone before the end of college, or not but you need a person in your life I think, or maybe I’m wrong and it’s better that you’re independent all through college. Whatever happens, happens. Also keep living your healthy life, go gym, hike, eat right, and so on. And don’t feel so bad on not so good days, stress eating gets to everyone. Try to say no to people, you can’t be influenced all the time. Otherwise you’ll never learn to have things your way. You can be helpful to people too, but sometimes you should make sure you get your own shit together first. I think you have all the tools needed to succeed in the rest of college and life, so make your choices wisely.

-Deanna Wong   July 13, 2017

Dear past Deanna, 

I think I’ve gotten college life down, better than my first 2 years for sure. I still am making mistakes though, kind of had some bad incidents as far as my behavior record with UCSD, but on my way to fixing that. Nothing that’ll put me on hold for graduating, I just have to deal with business and this should all be over next quarter. Long story short I passed out at an on campus event and I have some consequences to deal with but it’s all on me, I have to fix things. On the bright side, everything in my academics are right again. Above a 3.0 and I am on track to graduate by next spring. It’s really hard to write into this tiny notebook. I’m writing very intensely I’m sweating a little. It’s also not the coolest temperature. Sacramento brings the heat. In terms of my social/party life, this past year of college, and within the last quarter, has exceeded my first 2 years. Well part of the reason has been because I turned 21 this year. Legal drinking is a whole new game. You would think I can control myself at this point, but I still can’t some nights. I’ve definitely opted out of drinking a lot more this year. Self-control is getting better. A lot of seniors I grew close to this year are graduated now. It makes me really sad but I need to learn to get through this year without them. They are all going on their own paths for the future, and I wish them all the best and to visit me next year! My love life got a little bit spicier this year, but nothing drastic happened where I need to announce it. Still no girlfriend and I really want to have one more and more. Still actively using dating apps. Well just more recently since its summer now and I don’t have much else to do. Just trying to recharge myself mentally. I think a lot of things that happened this year has given me a bit of a mental drain. I think i actually like attention but I may have gotten more than I need for a year. My 21st birthday is the most extra day I’ve had in my life. Everything was funny, everyone was dressed up, and there were a lot of gifts. The best thing was all my friends being there just to celebrate my friend Nat and I turning on year older. Like it shouldn’t be that huge of a deal, but it became a big deal just because we wanted it to be. This really should be more of advice for future me like the 2 past me’s, so I’m gonna do that instead of blabbing about my life. i’m supposed to do that somewhere else. Alright it’s there, peace past me.

-Deanna Wong   July 5, 2018

Dear Future Deanna,

Not sure what to say. Well if past Deanna has been able to accomplish all she has up to now, future Deanna can keep up this level of excelling life plus more. You’re literally about to enter the actual adult world after this year. You need to figure out your plan even if you don’t want to. You gotta make moves to get where you want. Such as staying home or moving out as soon as possible. Get a woman, it’s time to be more proactive about your love life because if you don’t make moves, no one’s gonna do it for you. Maybe tell people how you actually feel if you feel for them. Still have to take risks. I don’t think past Deanna has taken any REAL risks. Like a risk that makes you sweat and super anxious beforehand but could be very worth it. But you’ve always had a logical side, so maybe listen to it if it’ll make your life better in the long run. I’ll continue later but I have to eat first. You are your own grown ass adult now, speak up for what you want. You can’t let other people dictate your outcome of situations. Take control of you situation. Take control of your situation. Be a good friend. You’ve gotten better at it by leaps and bounds, but there’s always room for self-improvement. Be appreciative of how far you’ve come. Don’t beat yourself too much, you still tend to do this from time to time. Take your own advices? I don’t think you’ve had to apply this yet, but you could try giving yourself a few pointers. Keep yourself tidy. Clean your room more often when you’re at school. Things pile up, and a cleaner space tends to give you a clearer mind. Keep in touch with those you don’t see as often. You tend to spend all your time with one group of people instead of reaching out more. This is why you don’t see some people enough. Develop this skill now and it’ll translate in the future. I think I’ll keep it to this for now, you’ll gain more wisdom as you endeavor into your final months at UCSD. Stay lit, stay safe, and be you. :)

-Deanna Wong   7/30/18

This is just some back and forth between myself that I had for the first 3 years of my college life. I’ll save my last year for another post. I feel like between each year I had some improvements, but a lot of the stupid stuff I did more or less are from all my non-sober nights in college. It’s kind of the same thing over and over but just with different people and different circumstances. Looking back at everything now, I’ve really become a lot more of a stable person. I don’t regret a single moment of undergrad. Although I find it really strange I felt like I needed to have a girlfriend at some point. I honestly with so occupied with my own life that I really did not need to add someone else to the equation. And even now I’m still kind of ok with my independence, maybe a bit too ok with my independence. I think honestly the right person will just come at the right time. I really think I need to give the meeting someone in the real world a shot. Well not now since California is in a lockdown but after this pans over I’ll try to go out there and find the love of my life. 

Stay safe out there y’all and don’t go spreading too many germs. I’m out gonna be raving in my house haha.

[ultraterrestrialstars]

personal post about social isolation, pay no attention

Isolation is difficult sometimes.  I live with my best friend, and he currently isn’t working, but he’s always here and I’m never truly alone on any day.  I also have 3 animals.  Yet lately, especially when he goes out of town -- as he is currently -- I struggle with the reality that I really have no one I can message or call to keep me company, talk to, or really interact with at all.  I didn’t even hear from my own mother today even though I sent her a message.  She just didn’t read it.  My dad is busy lately, getting himself into an M.C. honorably called Hell’s Our Home, and my sister is presumably just as busy as my little brother.  I’m really disconnected from everyone -- family and former friends.  Part of it started as me isolating myself because of depression and my bipolar disorder and C-PTSD but now that I can and try to reach out, there’s really no one left.  I try to do kind things, connect with people, but something always fails. 

I brought this nice gentleman I work with a necklace tonight -- it’s a necklace with the continent of Africa as a pendant but its’ colored red, yellow, and green for his home country.  He’s a direct immigrant - still has a very thick African accent.  The other night he asked me why it seemed like people don’t like him.  There were so many answers I could have given but I didn’t know how to.  How can I explain that outsiders anywhere in America are isolated by their peers, mistreated by microaggressive behaviors?  I am one of those outsiders.  I’ve spent my whole life being first “that d*ke” or “she, he, it, or whatever it is” and now “that f*ggot” because of the way I talk and I “pass” as a cis-male.  So even in this new skin of the man I am, I still get isolated and I look like any typical white Iowan guy.  The only difference is that I talk like an encyclopedia or not at all.  Anyway, I’m going off on a tangent -- tonight, when I brought him the necklace I promised to bring him, his whole spirit glowed.  He was so happy.  And he called me brother.  He also constantly affirms “what a nice man” I am when we work together.  That’s the kind of connection and kindness I want in the world.

It feels frustrating to desire connection, but to have no true friendships anymore.  My family loves me but as I have always been just outside both of my families, I’ve always been isolated by them. My mother loves me dearly, but spends a majority of her time watching/hanging out with my eight year old nephew or my sister.  My little brother actually got a great paying job -- better than anything I have -- and he’s living about 4 hours away. 

I’ve passed the age where video games and tv shows keep me satisfied or keep me company.  I’ve been throwing myself into creative work and my second job and just trying to find some connection to the world.  I never know if I am missing it by the width of a hair or if I’m just not paying attention.

I need friends, but sometimes I want to be alone, too.  I don’t have friends that respect boundaries or time or ... friends that seem to have any time to be a friend.  Everyone my age is having children or getting married and just trying to get by.  This social isolation becomes a puzzle I can’t put together, because there’s no solution to it.   We live in a society more isolated than it ever has been with the advent of some social media.  I want to get involved somewhere, in some community, but any time I try to, it feels superficial.  Like joining a Twitch stream or trying to embrace any creative online community feels performative.  I even tried some of those stupid dating apps just to meet people but I always delete it.  On Grindr all I get are 60 year old men and dick pics, and any other app I delete it because it’s really just consumed by spam bots and people I’m not really interested in getting to know.

As we get older, I feel we must be looking for deeper, truer connections, but what if you’ve been deprived of many of those connections your entire life?  I’ve spent 30 years as an outsider.  I have no fucking idea how to make friends, how to make friends that are meaningful. 

I suppose the solution is to grin and bare it, try to connect when I can, but nights like tonight, when I have no one to talk to, no one to even look forward to talking to, I realize the depth and solidity of my social isolation.

[scandinaviacroatiaengbergs]

Sunday: Oslo to Gothenburg (Bye-Bye to our Car, for Now!) and on to Copenhagen

There are a few things I wanted to note, just in general, but I’ve been forgetting to do so.  One: there are wind turbines all over the countryside in Norway and Sweden.  Two: the recycling program in Norway is very ahead-of-our-time (or the U.S.’s time, and I know to roll out such programs on a nationwide scale is easier to do in a smaller country than a larger one) and everyone recycles and composts  and the robot-directed sorting of bags of garbage is a sight to see (I saw it in a video that Ryley showed me).  Three: there are sooooooo many Teslas in Norway.  It is an actual fact that there are more Teslas per capita in Norway than in any other country (per my source: Eric Engberg).  Now, you’d think that this must just mean the people are super stoked to protect the environment and have loads of money to spend on buying expensive electric cars, and that is partially true, but Ryley and Roar said that many people spend way beyond their means and the government really incentivized electric car ownership, and Tesla was a huge resulting beneficiary of that.  Electric cars could drive in the bus lane for a while and there were more benefits, too, which I am forgetting.  It is really crazy how many Teslas there are on the road, and aside from that, there are just a lot of new cars, with very few that would qualify as “old” in the central city.  When we drove out of town, we saw more older models, but in the city, nope. I’ve also been thinking a lot about immigration in the late-19th and early-20th century to the U.S. from Scandinavia.  So I will digress for a minute: I know that when countries are war-torn, it makes a lot of sense for individuals and families to leave those regions, when they can (and as we see globally today and throughout history, there are so many tragic regions in which civilians are stuck in unlivable circumstances with no respite from the wars surrounding them). I also know from my own family history that people fled, say, Ireland because of famine, or Lithuania to seek an improved life in the U.S., even before abject ethic and religious persecution made conditions unsurvivable. I need to learn more about the causes for migration out of Scandinavia during the turn of the last century.  But, the lure of the “American Dream” was strong, even when a country wasn’t in a depression or there wasn’t a crop failure (though Norway had a huge potato crop failure that made many people leave, at the same time as Ireland, according to Roar), as far as I know.  And we see that immigrants from the turn of the last century to the U.S. have, by and large, left improved socio-economic legacies for their  descendants. But, when I travel to these areas today, and see some of the beauties of their regions, and size of cities and how these countries are able to develop social systems where there are many fewer people in poverty per capita than there are in our own U.S., I realize I need to learn more about why so many people left in the first place, and what the crises they were fleeing were, or whether they were just leaving to pursue riches in the U.S. when its doors were more open to such waves of immigrants (I mean, I wrote a book about this period, so I know very well the increasingly tight immigration laws of the late-19th to early-20th centuries and what “kinds” of people they privileged).  Anyway, I thought this about my Grandpa Sam too when we were in Lithuania, since he could certainly not have predicted the genocide that would develop there thirty years after he left.  He came to the U.S. alone from his family of two parents and five siblings (all but one of whom perished in the Holocaust), and seems to have traveled with a cousin. I do think about the asylum seekers who I’ve volunteered with in Albuquerque and somewhat like my uncle, they were really going into the unknown, because they hoped that gamble would make their lives better.  In the case of the asylum seekers, they’re often fleeing so much death, corruption, and destruction around them, and they hope that in the U.S. they’ll have a safer home for their children and more viable earning options for themselves. So, I am sorry to go along this tangent for so long, but I really do drive through the countryside here and I wonder why so many people left in the first place – simple as that.  I am sure different people left in different decades for very different reasons. Anyway, our last morning in Oslo was leisurely. We had to go out and find an ATM, though, since I had to leave about $70 for our Airbnb hosts to pay for parking, since we’d agreed upon this. To find an ATM on Sunday, though, was no easy task, so we went on a long walk to get to the nearest one, but that actually turned out very well, because we didn’t have to be out of the apartment at a particular time and we got to see some more neighborhoods that we hadn’t seen before.  We even found a little park right near our place that had a high hill, and we could see quite a panorama from the top. So, around 1, we left Oslo, avoiding by the smallest margin a collision in a roundabout (the Volvo’s brakes work really well, we learned!), and then made it to Gothenburg without much trouble at all. Eric booked our Airbnb in a suburb, and by the time we got in, the kids were ragged, unruly, and wild as hyenas with their squawking and back-talking and general silliness.  It was a mess. It took some stern words and some taking away of things (Rowan’s beloved Blundstone boots) to get them to know that they needed to pull it together, which they did, and we went to the Willy’s grocery store and got some dinner and got back and ate dinner, and the kids ate voluminously. After that, we tried to get the kids to bed, but that, again, was more protracted than ideal, and they weren’t asleep until nearly 10 p.m.  I should mention that the navigation in this suburb called Askim was hilarious and so convoluted; it was like driving from driveway to driveway, on tiny, tiny roads that, before GPS, I have no idea how anyone could’ve given directions to anyone unfamiliar with the area. So, the kids needed one thing after the next at bedtime – a story “from your mouth” (specifically, the serial saga of the cats Pickles and Mr. Pink that I’ve been telling since last summer), a story from a book, some water, to go to the bathroom, it’s too hot, there’s too much light, I want to sleep in with Cece, I want to go downstairs, etc. etc.  It was endless.  But, finally, they both zonked out, and then I couldn’t fall asleep until after midnight. I hope it doesn’t seem like I am complaining about the kids or their behavior a lot, because really, they roll with all of this traveling and moving from town to town pretty well, and they seem to love the adventure, and Rowan even expresses how much he loves it, repeatedly, and how sad he’s going to be when it’s over (though he has his art camp later this summer, and he *is* excited for that). But, our kids really are the loudest kids in any given room and the goofiest, so that is fun for us sometimes, but sometimes we need a knob with which we can dial down their volume considerably. We dropped our Volvo off this morning for its journey home, and while we were there, we saw another family, with two kids ages probably 8 and 6, and they were just sitting at a table with their parents while they waited for their car to be brought out. Our kids, by contrast, were needling each other and I actually heard a scream out of Cece when I was in the bathroom right before we left. Some great things can come out of their energy and curiosity, and we’re grateful for that, but, as I noted, sometimes, a dial would be useful ;)  I guess what goes around, comes around, since my mom once left my brother and I (at ages 4 and 6) with the guard at the front of some Smithsonian museum because we were being intolerable and she wanted to see the exhibit without our annoying behavior, so with the guard we sat.  That was also the day I flat-out insisted on wearing pleather boots and jeans in the humid, insane D.C. summertime weather. Anyway, I guess my kids come by their low points honestly ;) Anyway, so we *did* return the Volvo for its ocean journey home!  And now, I write this from a train to Copenhagen, and we’ll spend two nights there before flying to Croatia, land of my grandmother’s mother and ancestors.  The kids and I know, from Grandma Marion, how to say “I love you!” in Yugoslavian (as she calls it), so we’re ready for our travels there! This train ride started a bit stressfully, a) because we have a lot of loot to get situated on board, and b) there are no seat numbers above all of the seats, so it was a total frustrating guessing game to figure out which seats are ours.  But we did, and since then, the ride has been uneventful, with some beautiful ocean scenery and small towns (and some not-so-small towns) with red houses and intensely green fields. The kids have had some iPad time (Cece is doing a Montessori “hundreds board” right now and Rowan was laughing loud enough for all in our car to hear to Shawn the Sheep).  They are going to be tired tonight in Copenhagen, but we might tow them around in a bike trailer, so we’ll see what develops! More soon!

[sitinthelight]

Well Zach is in his hometown for a few days and I’m in this weird restless mood while being super tired at the exact same time. 

I want to go drinking and I want to dance. Actually, I mostly just want to dance.  I want to be happy and so fucking giddy that I’m out of my mind and care free and just be in that moment when nothing matters so I’m going to have a good time.

Do you ever have a conversation and you realize hmmm, I probably shouldn’t have said that because now it’s weird? I mean, that’s kind of every extended conversation I have with anyone but still.

I kind of want to punch myself in the face (((: but at the same time, I want to go dancing, so? 

I am not going to beat myself up over this! I refuse to! You know, I have gotten so much better about feeling guilty over everything! And I was being vulnerable! So bonus points, right? 

Anyway, I’m friends with my ex. I guess we’ve become good friends in the past several months. He asked me if I still was planning to move to Charlotte and of course my whole situation is convoluted (in my mind) so I was like, can I explain it to you over skye because I didn’t feel like talking about it through text. 

Jesus, I have no idea how anyone deals with me and talking to me because words don’t come out of my mouth correctly? Like in my head I’m just like this is what I will say! But when it comes out of my mouth it’s like scrabble with words. Have fun rearranging my sentence and guessing what I’m trying to say! AND I SAID NOT TO BEAT MYSELF UP. I will learn how to talk to people one day, I swear. 

SO, we’re skyping and he finally gets me to start talking about the situation at hand and I’m explaining the developments in some sort of way and telling him my options. I then proceed to kind of casually mention my hesitation of moving to a new place with Zach because I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be with him. AND boy oh boy oh boy, why did I mention that? To my ex. 

Granted, he took it well. He is probably used to my awkwardness by now so I’m guessing that helps and he was very nice and understanding about it and didn’t ask any further questions and I don’t even remember what I said after that.

But I’m kind of mortified. 

Btw, I was finally emailed the new leasing terms for my apartment as this current lease ends in July. The new rent will be nearly $1000 and I’m just in shock that they put it up that high out of seemingly no where? With no justification. This is a nice place, I have been very fortunate to have been able to live here for the past 2 years but fuck that. I’m going to start paying my own rent in July and I’m not spending that much money on rent in fucking Winston Salem. Literally, the only other apartments in this area that are that expensive are the fancy luxury ones downtown. 

Is $1000 a month normal in other cities or even considered a steal for a 2 bedroom 2 bath? Oh absolutely, but this is Winston Salem. I was told that the price I’ve been paying this past year was way too high but this extra $150 is just head-scratching. How? Why? What on earth. I know Charlotte is worse but like, this isn’t Charlotte. 

Yikes can I go on a tangent. Anywayyyyy, yes. I am mortified. Yep yep yep yep yep. Always saying a little toooooo much to people who don’t really need to know that much. Is he a good friend? yes. But he is also my ex and he doesn’t need shit like that dumped on him as I’m sure he has his own problems to deal with.

But it’s been done. It has been said. He was nice about it! I will let this feeling happen for as long as it needs to and then I will resume normal business. I will apologize in the morning and it will be fine. He’ll be cool about it like he always is.

However, there is some adrenaline in my system right now. Like, my mind is going wwwoooooosh all over the place. 

I always used to be on my toes around my ex, even during the month and a half we dated. Even during everything that happened after that. He gave me soooo much social anxiety. I once held my pee in for like 4 hours hanging out with him because I was too afraid to move or say I had to go to the bathroom. But Jesus, I reallyyyyy liked him and I wanted to get to know him better and whelp, it’s several years later and I finally am getting over my social anxiety with him. Talking to him regularly has definitely helped. 

Honestly, my social anxiety hasn’t been bad lately. I’m still reluctant to make phone calls, except at work. I’m doing so much better with calling people at work. That used to be my most hated task at the bookstore. I hated calling customers to give them bad news about their orders. I always tried to send out emails instead. 

But I’ve been chatty with my coworkers and trying to establish “bonds” with them. Dave and Busters opened in the mall so I’m trying to slowly and low-key convince my coworker to go with me. She’s pretty cool. We actually have a lot in common but sadly we are both awkward introverts so it’s taken a year of working with each other to finally figure that out. 

The coworker I really wanted to be friends with quit. I feel like we could have been pretty good friends because we have SO much in common and she definitely tried getting to know me on multiple occasions but my personality can be so unforgiving. I act uninterested in fear of being overly interested and IT IS FUCKING GREAT ((((((:

It’s also very possible that I may have had a tiny crush on her. Not like an OMG I AM OBSESSED WITH THIS PERSON type of crush.  More like, she’s cute and quirky and I really think she’s cool but I have a boyfriend so these thoughts will stay subdued. 

But I haven’t really felt socially anxious lately? And that’s been great. It makes my world a smidge more easier. Depression though? Still here. Always lurking. Always waiting for a moment to strike. The nice weather helps so much though. I’m still weighing pros and cons of medication and therapy in my current situation. I definitely want to put a lot more research and thought into it before I make any decisions. I just know that I want to be on some proper treatment path before seasonal depression hits again. 

You know, I have the day off tomorrow. Originally I was going to stay in for most of the day. I was going to leave to pick up a package from the front office (because I bought the most  “me” shoes ever”), but now I’m debating actually going out and doing something. 

I kind of want to go downtown. That’s so far been my favorite part of this city. There is a brewery/bar that makes an amazing vegetarian burger and though I’m not vegetarian, it’s a fucking amazing burger. Right next to that brewery is a really cool store that sells local items and they have a huge selection of vintage clothes! I walked in out of curiosity a few weeks ago and fell in love with the atmosphere and just the general vibe of the place. 

I’m now considering this because I just got an email (who sends emails after midnight?) from the metaphysical store downtown. There is apparently going to be a flash sale and while I don’t need new crystals, they had some really cool ones last time I was in there and hey, maybe this is the time to pick some new ones up. 

This is all just a late night and too tired to be alive fever dream though. Honestly, I’ll probably just stay in but one of these days, I’ll do something fun. When I finally get this driving thing down, I’ll have as many fun days as I want because it just sounds like a hassle getting an uber there and back and walking around downtown (which is huge and not every street is entirely safe) by myself. Like the crystal store. It’s really only a ten minute walk but I’m a chicken, okay? I’ve never dealt with so many creeps in my life in any other city as I have here. Did that sentence even make sense? Probably not, I don’t care. 

BUT I MIGHT SEE SUPERORGANISM SUNDAY. SO THAT WILL BE FUN.

I’m really hoping Zach will be up for it. I’m praying he will be. I really really really want to go. I’ve become so fond of this band. I’d be so happy to see them live. Also the venue is in a former mid-century car dealership so I’m dying to see it. Zach is the only person whose been around me often enough to know this but I LOVE mid-century modern design and architecture. 

I also want a reason to wear fun make up and dress up. Like, this is an excuse to use crazy eyeshadow and glitter because the band is fairly eccentric. 

We’ll see though. Zach was supposed to be driving back Saturday evening but his dad bought tickets to see some musician (Bob...S...something) in Virginia for Saturday evening so he’ll be driving back Sunday morning instead :/ It’s like a 4 hour drive from there to here so I don’t know if he’ll have the energy or motivation to drive 1.5 hours to Durham for a band he is only mildly interested in. 

I really should just stay in tomorrow though. I could really use the time to answer the essay questions for my application for school and answer back to the advisor (that they already assigned me?). He just wants to go over the program details with me because it is a bit rigorous. I’m up for the challenge though. I need something productive to occupy my time with and I’ve had a good break these past 2 years.