#coming home and taking my time in grad school without pressuring myself to finish as soon as possible

[glittertimes]

I turned 24 yesterday and I think this is the first time I’ve been excited to be older rather than terrified of it

[sirphillipcranestanaccount]

Modern AU teaser under the cut. Let me know what y’all think!

“Ugggh” Eloise said, dropping her forehead onto the textbook that lay on the table in front of her. She looked at her phone, 10:30 on a Friday night and she was still in the library. “How did I get myself into this situation?” she raised her head and looked across the table at Penelope, “Pen, when I said ‘oh I think I’m going to get a master’s in English’, English of all things, why didn’t you talk me out of it?”

Penelope shifted her eyes from her laptop screen to Eloise without moving her head. “Because,” she began to reply, never once stopping her typing “I believe your exact words were ‘Pen, I’m going to grad school and there’s no way you can talk me out of it’.” 

“She’s right, El,” Edwina said not bothering to look up from her computer, “I have it on video.” 

“How many drinks had I had up to that point?” Eloise’s head was once again in her textbook making her words difficult to hear. “And was I aware at the time that I would have to read The Canterbury Tales again?”

“None and yes,” Penelope replied.

“Ugh,” Eloise repeated, “what are you two working on?” she wanted to distract herself from Chaucer for a moment,

“I’m writing a paper about the works and political activism of Susan Sontag,” Penelope answered.

“I’m writing a reflection on a trip I had to take to the Met,” Edwina stated, “so I’m attempting to be engaging about statues I have seen on what must be at least a hundred occasions.”

“Do you guys remember in undergrad when we used to do fun and interesting things on the weekends?” Eloise asked. 

“I don’t think that emptying 4 bottles of Barefoot Riesling and eating buffalo wings while watching Golden Girls re-runs could be deemed interesting in any sense of the word,” Penelope said, “plus, judging by the frequency with which Eddie’s phone has been vibrating, she certainly has an interesting weekend ahead of her,” she smirked.

Eloise’s head popped up in interest. Finally a distraction! “Are these texts from a gentleman?” she asked with a tone of overstated interest.

Edwina started to flush “Do you guys remember that TA I had last semester for my archaeology class?”

“The one who’s so smart and funny and cute and always replied to your e-mails right away?” Eloise replied, “I’m not sure if you mentioned him.”

Edwina’s eyes narrowed at Eloise’s teasing, “Well, we went out and got coffee the other week and we’ve been texting ever since, and long story short I think I’m going to marry him.”

“Marriage?” Eloise scoffed, “have you two even…?” she let her words trail off, but let a rude gesture with her hands finish the statement.

“I was being facetious,” Edwina replied, “and no, I haven’t slept with him,” she returned to typing just before adding, “Very ladylike hand gesture by the way.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I’ve never once tried to be ladylike in my life,” Eloise retorted.

“The blouse and pencil skirt you’re wearing at the library would state otherwise,” Penelope teased.

“Pen, you know I have to wear this when I tutor,” she shot back “apparently I have to look professional when I’m trying to help freshmen comp lit majors figure out what Candide is about.”

“What is Candide about?” Edwina asked.

“Hell if I know,” Eloise replied with a shrug. She looked back at her phone, “can we go home now?” she asked, “I hate walking through the park after 11.”

Penelope closed her computer, “I was about to suggest the same.”

As the 3 women walked out of the now-empty library Eloise spotted something on a bench in the vestibule between the library doors. It was a leather-bound notebook with a snap closure. Eloise couldn’t help but be curious, so she opened it.

“What on Earth are you doing El?” Penelope asked, “we are in New York City, god knows where that’s been!”

“Calm down Pen, it’s not street trash,” she replied. She opened to the first page of the notebook and read: property of Phillip Crane. If found, please contact pcrane282@nyu.edu

Phillip got home and all but went straight to sleep. Well, first he thanked and said goodbye to his Aunt who had been kind enough to watch his children after their most recent nanny had quit.

It appeared that the final straw for the most recent young lady–in what seemed to be a revolving door of unfortunate women (and some men)– was when the twins had decided to put a layer of cream cheese on the deodorant that they found in her purse. Phillip was more bewildered by his children’s antics than anybody, but even he had to admit that someone who decided to pursue a career in child care ought to be made of sterner stuff. 

But today had been a long day, and he needed to sleep before he went back to the lab tomorrow. He peaked his head into Oliver and Amanda’s room to make sure they were asleep. Or, if not asleep, not causing trouble. Then he went to his room and simply fell face down on the bed.

Phillip woke up the next morning to his alarm at 6 am in the clothes he had worn the day previous. He cursed under his breath, he was planning to wear that pair of khakis again today, but now they were all wrinkled and so was his shirt. Phillip went out into the kitchen and started making coffee when he heard a small voice from behind him.

“Daddy, you’re not going to wear those clothes to work are you?” He turned around to see Amanda in her pajamas. 

“Don’t I look good?” Phillip joked with her.

“You look like you slept in your clothes,” she said flatly, moving a chair to the side of the cabinet to reach for the cereal that was a bit too high for her to reach on her own. 

“That’s just the look I was going for,” he smiled and took a sip of his coffee, “do you want me to pack your lunch for you?” he asked. He didn’t have to be at the lab until 9:00 this morning. 

“No thanks,” Amanda said passing him to get milk from the refrigerator, “Me and Oliver packed our lunches last night.”

Phillip felt his stomach knot. He was proud that both of his children were self-sufficient, but he hated the fact that they had to be. Ever since their mother died–and frankly, before–they had needed to be like little adults, in spite of being 8 years old. Phillip tried the best he could to be a good dad to them, but working toward a Ph.D. and having the pressure of a research fellowship on one’s shoulders made active fathering somewhat difficult. 

“What did you pack, is it healthy?” Phillip asked, trying to make up for his dead-beat ways.

“Sandwich, apples, yogurt, and cheez-its,” she said matter of factly “I don’t know what Oliver put in his.”

As if on cue Oliver walked into the kitchen, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, “I made the same thing but with chips instead of yogurt, because yogurt is gross.” He joined his sister at the countertop and poured cereal into a bowl that Amanda had already set out for him.

“Alright, kids, what’s on the schedule for today?” Phillip said, putting down his coffee, “anything after school that I should let Aunt Gertie know about?”

“I have piano right after school,” Amanda stated.

“And I have a hockey game at 5,” Oliver said with a mouth full of cereal, “can you come, Dad?”

Phillip’s heart sank, he knew he probably wasn’t going to be able to make it, but he decided to try and humor his son anyway. 

“Let me check my book,” he said walking over to his bag. He looked in the brown satchel to find that he couldn’t find the familiar brown leather datebook.

“Shit,” he whispered under his breath, “shit shit shit shit shit.”

“Are you okay dad?” Oliver asked, once more with his mouth full.

“Yes,” Phillip said with a sigh “I just can’t find my datebook.”

Phillip grabbed his phone to check the schedule he tried to maintain electronically and saw that he had an e-mail.

Dear Mr. Crane,

Hello! I just wanted to contact you because I believe I found your datebook outside the library last night. At least, this is the e-mail that was written to contact in case it was found. What is the best way that I can return it to you? I know I’m personally lost without my planner. Let me know how I can get it back to you and I will be sure to do so ASAP.

Sincerely,

Eloise Bridgerton, B.A.

Student | NYU Graduate School of Arts & Science

ebridge240@nyu.edu

(212)995-3422

P.S. I suppose I should ask you to describe it, just to make sure I’m handing it off to the right person. Once you’ve done that I will promptly return it to you.

[goldeneyedgirl]

2020 Fic Meme

It happens every year like clockwork. The Fic Round-Up Meme. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to it this year because I’ve written so much. As usual, compiled from ancient Livejournal fic memes. I like doing it as kind of a time capsule of my writing. If anyone else wants to take a crack, feel free. I love reading writers’ throughs on their own work. <3 No tagging because that is PRESSURE. 

Twilight

12 Days of Fic-Mas (Twilight, WIP) Day 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 + Christmas Eve Twelve days of fic extracts, previews, and drabbles focusing on Alice Cullen and Jess/Jasper Hale: Anathema, the KidFic, Married in Vegas, Daemons, Memento Vivere, Human Alice Kills James, Jess and Alice do Prom, Forgotten, Vampires in Vegas, Shadow to Light Missing Scene, Hybrid, Cowboys and Angel Solstice, and All These Broken Things

Afterglow (Alice/Jasper, AU, Romance, G)  There were three things of which she was certain. The first was that her name was Alice. The second was that she was born an angel. And three, she was getting ready to die.

Against a Wall (Alice/Jasper, Human/Vampire AU, Romance, Angst, PG) If you asked anyone with the surname ‘Whitlock’, they’d tell you that the family was cursed. It was the Whitlock Curse to blame the day the bank took the ranch away from Jasper’s own father.      

And Found (Alice/Jasper, Soulmark AU, Romance, PG) The soul mark appears when Alice is six. It is a twisted ribbon of a mark, from the inside of her left elbow, up her arm, over her shoulder, along her clavicle, over her right shoulder and down to her right wrist. What ugly, soulless individual could inspire such a mark?

Jar of Hearts Pt 1 Pt 2 (WIP) (Alice, Emmett, Seth, MCU xover, Angst, PG) The snap came for everyone - “He said he’d never leave me,” she says in a wobbly voice. “He promised me.”“It wasn’t by choice,” Emmett rushes to tell her. “You were his last thought; he tried so hard to get home before he…”

Never a Question (Alice/Jasper, AU, Angst, G)  Carlisle is quite sure that he’s watching his son’s heart break into a million pieces as he stares at his human mate, slowly dying alone, not a single person allowed to hold her hand.

Hand in Hand (Alice/Jasper, AU, Fluff, G)  “Never,” he swears, pressing a kiss to her cheek that makes her beam -  “There’s not a single moment I can think of that cannot be improved by your presence, darlin’.”

Love & Duty (Alice/Jasper, AU, Romance, G)  A trainee witch is sent to treat a wounded cowboy from her brother coven. 

Shadow to Light (WIP) (Alice/Jasper, AU Angst, PG) In 1918, Jasper lures the newborn known as Mary-Alice back to Monterrey. He is lost to her before it even begins. (Ch 6-8)

The Way of Things (Alice/Jasper, AU, Drama, M)  She truly doesn’t know what comes next. He truly doesn’t know if it will be good or bad. They will live this life for as long as it lasts, long may it last, surrounded by the people they love and trust. 

What You Say (Alice/Jessamine, Canon, Angst, M)  Edward might have thought Aro was their reckoning, but Alice knows for her, it is Jessamine’s hurt.

Total number of completed stories: ELEVEN. 

Total word count: 90,155 words were formally posted - not including snippets, previews (aside from FicMas) or anything that was shared on the Discord server. 

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted? I fucking nailed it. Like, seriously. THREE chapters of Shadow to Light? Every single day of JaliceWeek AND FicMas? I mean, I think the lockdown definitely helped with free time, and not going to lie, the iOS shutdown of Fortnite probably assisted my productivity. 

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January? The Discord has so much to answer for. I wrote porn. Like, what. What. What. What. I find this bizarre and did not have ‘let’s just go full NC17 in 2020′ on my bingo card, but it happened. In fact, 2019 Lexie has just gone full spit-take and yelled, “WHAT?!” at the top of her lungs. 

And to make it more surprising, it’s both het and f/f porn. Like, mind-blown. Who am I anymore?

What’s your own favourite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest? The Way of Things, What You Say, And Found, & Afterglow. All fics that came together really well, that felt like *me*, and had hopeful endings. I’m really proud of them. 

STL doesn’t get an opportunity to be apart of this til it’s finished. 

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them? The porn. 

Apparently, I can write it. Who knew? 

I definitely threw caution to the wind with JaliceWeek and just went for whatever crossed my mind and stopped worrying so much. Like, whatever, this is what I want to write so I will. I mean, the MCU crossover is happening in a slightly more obscure way than I initially envisaged it, it’s definitely a better fic for it.

I joined the Discord, and that’s been amazing. I’ve spent my last few fandoms existing in kind of a vacuum because of bad experiences and the fact I’m usually doing something niche, so having people to talk to who are so nice and welcoming and are happy to ignore my special brand of obnoxiousness is so lovely and has had such a good affect on my mental health. Sometimes you need people you can be your dorkiest self with. 

My instincts are pretty good as far as fic goes, people are awesome, and I can write sex scenes. It’s been a learning curve, let me tell you that. 

Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the New Year?  I have to balance grad school, my business, and my writing, so that’s going to be interesting. I think I need to look at my fic more as downtime than a high-stress ‘job’ because I LOVE writing it. I love writing. I love reading. But I get in my own head and overthink. So my goals are BALANCE and RELAX. 

My best story of this year: Oh man, that’s not something I can judge. I am so incredibly proud of how Afterglow, And Found, and The Way of Things turned out. Especially considering I was so behind with JaliceWeek, and I think I was putting out a fic a day, and freaking out because I was lacking ideas, so when these three just came together exactly how I wanted them, it was a good moment. 

My most popular story: Shadow to Light. Look, if that’s my legacy to fandom, I’ve done pretty damn well. I’m really, really appreciative of how enthusiastic people are about this ‘verse. I don’t always understand it, because I can see how my writing has changed and how the story has evolved massively (first it was supposed to be a one-shot, then five chapters.) I hope that it ends up being satisfying for everyone because I have LOVED writing it, even if I am slower than molasses. 

Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion: Everyone is always so damn enthusiastic about my writing. I think maybe Hybrid is kind of a big question mark for everyone at the moment because there are so many questions and no answers yet. 

And any of the Jessamine/Alice. That’s a new niche, I get not everyone is into it. But it’s happening and will continue into 2020.

Most fun story to write:  What You Say or Jess and Alice at Prom. Jess is a little snarkier than Jasper, less controlled, and the girls are super fun to write, even high-tension scenes. 

Most Sexy Story: Oh, I can answer this now! Um, maybe The Way of Things or Jess and Alice at Prom? Yup, those are my picks. 

Story with the single sexiest moment:  The Way of Things. This happened before the Discord Intervention, and I’m genuinely not sure if I’m happy with the end of the Prom fic, so it might be reworked slightly in the future. But The Way of Things I was really happy with because it covered so many ideas I had in a way that fit together well. 

That’s where she makes good on her unspoken promises from aeons again, of their private victory celebration. She sits astride him, her hips rolling hard against his, drawing out his groans and growls as he grips her thighs almost tight enough to crack. Their gazes are locked the entire time, her tongue skimming over her lips, as she lets her emotions tell him everything that she wants and everything she plans to take.

He remembers fucking her in the dirt in Dacia; his mouth between her legs as she hollered obscenities in a Paris attic; and the urgent, passionate loving-making of a marriage finally consummated.

She remembers bloody emeralds looped around her throat and resting between her breasts as she gets down on her knees and takes him into her mouth, his fingers tangled in her hair; the delicious weight of him on top of her, their sweat mingling and cooling in the frozen night as their flimsy bed creaked against the wall; and his soft encouragement in her ear as he grasps her around the waist, their hands resting together on the gentle swell of her stomach. 

Most “holy crap, that’s wrong, even for you” story: I think I restrained myself from anything too dark or twisted this year, actually. Oh, wait, Vampires in Vegas. That one has some pretty dark implications about Alice’s life, about the vampire underworld, and Jasper’s behaviour, especially as it goes one. No fic that deals with someone being put into sex work without educated consent is going to avoid being dark, and I think it’s logical that vampires would have their hands in a lot of illegal yet profitable areas. 

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters: Anything with Jessamine/Alice because, like, Jess isn’t a name-swap of Jasper, and the relationship dynamic shifts with the slight personality shifts. And then you have to consider the family and social dynamic of two women in the relationship, so working all that out was fun. 

Jar of Hearts is another one, because I had to work out who the fic was going to follow and what was lost. And Emmett and Alice pretty much don’t interact in canon, but they were chosen for a reason. I’ve stripped them down to their worst, most isolated selves without their ‘true north’ (Rose and Jasper) or their moral center (Carlisle and Esme), or even their secret weapon (Edward). Seth, too, has been isolated from his family and friends, and is especially ‘other’ in this situation. This is an MCU crossover, so we’re kind of following a heroes’ journey with the last of Forks’ supernatural creatures.

Hardest story to write: Shadow to Light because of the way I have to use language, because of the plot strands from canon when I hate writing canon material, and how the characters have changed and how this new version reflects the old version. 

Against a Wall, as well, because of the in-verse time crunch I had - I needed Jasper damaged, military-minded, and changed by age 19. And I needed the boy broken. I’m happy with it, the story is done and dusted, but it didn’t quite turn out how I planned. And that’s okay, because I like this version. But I think I tackled something a lot bigger than I anticipated with it. 

Most disappointing:  Look, I love the verse and the set-up, but I think Love & Duty could do with another 2k words for build-up. I just ran out of time, honestly, to build up that mutual attraction between Alice and Jasper. 

Easiest story to write: Anathema, because Alice’s voice was so clear in it. Anathema!Alice knows exactly who she is, and that’s always fun. And the Shadow to Light Missing Scene; it wasn’t as long as I hoped, but it turned out exactly as I imagined it happening. 

Biggest surprise:  Everyone really, really liked Forgotten. And Vampires in Vegas, which I honestly thought were the weakest offerings during FicMas. 

Most unintentionally telling story:  The Way of Things. There’s so little dialogue, and it’s covering such a massive amount of time and story that it’s intentionally written to tell. 

Story I’d like to revise: Love & Duty, and Married in Vegas. A little polish, a little shine, it’s fine. For Love & Duty, it’s definitely the time crunch I need to go back and fix; for Married in Vegas, it’s just reflective of how long ago I started it. I’m a better writer, I know the characters more, and I’m less prone to overly dramatic plot twists. 

Story I didn’t write but will at some point, I swear: Look, let me lay the groundwork now so that no one who isn’t on the Discord isn’t startled. 

There’s going to be a Jess/Jasper/Alice threesome fic, and I regret nothing. 

I really, really want to get All These Broken Things redone and posted because it’s getting silly how long it’s just been sitting there. 

I want to actually write Monster, which is a fic I don’t talk about much but I want to write. It’s a question about who the monster of the story is, and I’m not sure I’m as skilled as I should be, to write it, but I want to try. 

And one of my numerous attempts at a Haunted House Cryptid fic. It has to happen, I have so many ideas!

[wanderinglotus7]

Crazy Crazy Crazy

Some days I just want to scream! Between school, work, and internship, I feel like I’m working three full time jobs. And the pressure is on. This week I started midterms and work (gosh). I’m finished with midterms for Clinical and Macro plus one essay for Human Behavior. Now, I have two papers due next Wednesday and Thursday. I haven’t gotten much sleep lately because of midterms and work. Along with midterms, I still have to complete assignments for Field Education which I feel like I’m behind. I’ve done four assignments out of a long list of other things that need to get done before the end of the semester. And I still have to focus and complete tasks required of me from Amirah. It was brought up yesterday in class that Spring semester might be online again. If so, can students get a discount on our tuition for next semester.

Okay, Restaurant Depot didn’t workout. I went for an interview, killed it, got hired, and then three or four weeks later I receive an email saying I’m no longer an employee. How did I lose a job that I didn’t even start yet? All things happen for a reason. God has a better plan for me. Back to the drawing board! Blessed, I got an interview with Chipotle. Now this opportunity actually worked-out. I’m an official employee. I work Friday-Sunday on the evening shift part time. I commend all those working in food service; it isn’t as easy as you would think. Every shift so far, I’m coming home with my feet and back hurting. I’m overall exhausted because of the long days. Mondays and Thursdays are the only days I really have to catch up on sleep, but that doesn’t always happen because of school work. I’m not going to complain because I need the money. Also, my coworkers aren’t bad people, they are friendly. And God answered my prayer because I’m working with people around my age and I wanted a working environment like that. I never asked what my pay will be so I have to wait for my first paycheck in order to readjust my budget. I can’t forget that Chipotle is still close to my house, basically down the street, I get free food on every shift, and a fifty percent employee discount.

Amirah is going great! The commute isn’t too bad; it’s between forty to an hour depending on the traffic. Good thing Kandi is good on gas because I have to fill her up every Tuesday. I get my gas in the area of my field placement because it’s cheaper than in town and other places around. Amirah went over their goal for HOPE 2020 and are able to open their second safe home in CT. They are in the process of hiring people for positions in MA and CT. Because of COVID, we only have three participants residing in the home, and spots are still limited for new participants. However, we might receive more because last Friday Heather and Sarah did some interviews for new participants and employees. In development, the organization plans to open a community resource center in January. I do feel like I’m not doing enough, but that what’s happens when I compare myself to others (I really need to stop doing that). At the end of the day, I am Me, and I can only be Me. My approach to situations will always be different from someone else’s approach.

This move has been a rough adjustment like the fortune teller told me. Last month, I locked my keys in the car which lead to a massive mental breakdown in the shopping plaza parking lot. All the new changes and emotions I’ve ignored hit me hard that day. It was a headache, but everything got resolved. God has me covered! Without him I don’t know where I’ll be at. I’m always praying and listening to what he’s telling me (I try my best anyway). I’m still reading my bible & devotions, I found new pastors that I relate to and seek ministry, and I always take the time to tell the Lord that I’m forever grateful for everything he keeps doing for me each and every day. 

I need to do a better job of taking care of myself mentally. I keep placing this unnecessary stress on myself which makes life more complicated than it needs to be. I’ve been using my individual supervision at my internship as little therapy sessions which has been helpful. It’s nice just to hear myself out-loud without feeling crazy. I might need to change my self care practices just a bit especially with the weather changing (the cold in Boston is no joke). What’s consistent is journaling and listening to music. I haven’t written much poetry lately, however, I’m going to try completing the book Patricia gifted me. It’s a poetry activity book. I’ve done two topics, the next one is First Love (that’s going to be interesting). When things do get chaotic, I have people in my life that I can lean on. I need to work on allowing these individuals to be there for me, and ask for help when I know I need help. Suffering/struggling in silence isn’t healthy. Next Tuesday, I begin group therapy for my bulimia & body image.

I told myself last year that If I get into another relationship it was going to be a serious committed relationship that is going to lead to a future. I guess what...I’m in a relationship. And it’s with a former ex boyfriend. I don’t if that term really applies he’s the only boyfriend & ex I ever had. If I were to tell the entire story in-depth it would sound so complicated. Honestly, I thought I was going to meet someone while in grad school or meet someone (or people) in Boston. Me and Erik never really let each other go I guess. Some how we always end up reconnecting in some type of way. I struggled for a long time to understand if this was a sign that we should be together or this was a start to a toxic cycle. Either way, I approached the situation with caution. It’s been three years. A lot of things have happened during that time. We are different people. We both agreed that at the beginning neither of us was ready to be in a relationship, but we both tried in our broken states. It’ just a lot for me especially after finding closure and forgiveness and he reappears into my life (double whammy). No matter what, through the disappointment and dishonesty, I never stopped caring about him. I was always there supporting him through everything. Honestly, it wasn’t an easy decision, but I gave him another chance. I do see the changes he has made over the three years. Praying this is a blessing.

[karrova]

okay i need to talk about some things. tonight i had my workshop for class, a workshop that i was extremely distraught about, i felt that i’d put way too much of myself in the piece i submitted and i felt like it was really going to hurt me to hear people talk about the things that were wrong with it. and what the fuck, i went and i was the last story our professor wanted to talk about and i was fucking shaking the entire time and he just fucking read word for word what i wrote and and talked about how smart and emotionally honest it was and idk wtf. three people sent me their responses over email and they said that it was their favorite piece they’ve read all semester. i’m just idk. i just dont understand. 

and after my workshop was finished my professor said “i’d like to talk to you two after class” and pointed at me and my best friend. and everyone left and we started talking and he told us we’ve been producing phenomenal work and that we should be taking graduate classes and that he was going to talk to some of the graduate teachers about getting us into one of their classes which is just like wtf? and he was talking about graduate school and how he’s there for us with whatever we need and like two days ago i was like okay I'm going to put off grad school but now wtf am i supposed to do?? 

i dont know what i’m supposed to do. on one hand i’m like i want to take year off and just like pick a few places to go live in for months at a time, like spend two months in rome, move on to somewhere else and do the same, maybe spend a few months in chicago because i love it there so much. i dont know. i’d just like to leave this place for a while but at the same time, how realistic is that? i cant just take a year off and read and write and travel. where’s the money for that coming from? also the terror of not going to grad school and then getting trapped in my home, stagnant, working a job i hate just to have something to do with my time sounds like utter hell and i cannot do that. that’s what terrifies me most about putting it off, and i know it’s only a year but i’ve been so miserable now and i have a lot going on a lot of distractions, and then who knows what cycles of misery i might fall into.

going to grad school would mean certainty which is something i’ve desperately been trying to find recently. i’ve been so utterly uncertain about everything in my life recently. idk. i just can’t understand this. i dont get it. there’s so much upheaval in my life recently, i just want something stable finally, i want something to cling to and i dont have that. i dont know. i just can’t believe this is happening. i dont understand why things are happening like this? i cant find any semblance of meaning or comfort or idk idk what i’m looking for. 

and beyond this i’m obviously so lucky and fortunate to have this professor who i’ve looked up to for so long come to me and tell me that he’s there with whatever i need from him. i dont know. i love him. im so lucky to have him as my teacher and to have him believe in me. belief in other people is fucking weird. im lucky to have his belief but it doesnt feel real. 

also, how am i supposed to be a writer when i hate the idea of myself existing outside of myself. i hate knowing that people out there can think of me and have thoughts of me. i dont like knowing that i’m a real person and that’s all writing is, it’s sharing yourself, even if it’s not really yourself, there’s always some part of you in there. i dont know if i can handle doing that. i was actually shaking when they did my workshop because of how uncomfortable i was. and he started reading it line by line? i dont know. i dont know.

maybe i go abroad and teach english somewhere, that’s always an option right? for a year? fuck and then i think about having to leave the people i love and i cant let myself because the pain of knowing we’ll have to be separated is unbearable. i just cannot even comprehend it yet, and i dont know what that means for when the time actually comes to separate and let go. fuck 

i dont know. there’s way too much pressure put on people to achieve society's idea of success. it’s way too much and it’s fucking unfair. i’m shocked that people dont understand that. i guess life isn’t fair in general but it really should be a little easier, i dont care what anyone says. 

at least i have bjork, and rilke, and keats, and anne, and anaïs, and darl and jewel, and townes, and william, and tabitha and mary and hunter, and jack, and michael and chloe and sonja, and mike and ryan, and chad even though we havent spoken in a while and there’s a strange distance that’s painful to think about. and i have my family and my sweet puppy dog turner. the other day my dad asked me if i was happy and said that i didnt seem happy. and i lied and i told him i just had a lot of work and i was tired. and i wonder why i did that. i have so many chances to tell people how i feel and that i’m not okay and i always choose to lie and i really wonder why i do that. i did a psychedelic drug in early august and the entire time after the initial first few hours i kept trying to figure out why i am the way i am and i cant fucking figure it out, i couldn't then and i cant now, but i can see all these walls i put up and i can recognize all the times i lie and withhold to keep myself from releasing any part of myself out into the world. 

i understand this must sound strange considering i’m writing this horrendously long and in depth post about my entire mental state and well being on the internet where anyone can read it but the distance between myself and the people who follow me here is just far enough to where i can feel supported or at least listened to without feeling invaded and exposed. i dont know if that makes sense. 

i really dont know much of anything anymore. 

even with all of this out i still dont feel like the mess inside of me is any less messy. my heart is tangled. 

please do not reblog 

[mrsslrss]

2018.

My first memory of 2018: I woke up at 5 a.m. and spotted an enormous bug on my bedroom wall. I was mildly hungover after a really lovely and somewhat raucous party in my house, and when I saw the bug I felt like my stomach dropped out of my body. (I’m a wimp! It had so many legs! Stay with me.) I tried to rouse M for about 10 minutes to kill the bug with no luck, then told myself, with an air of forced gravity, It’s 2018, and I must kill the bug myself. Which, I am glad to report, I did. 

I think I told that story a lot this year in the hopes that the more I retold it, the more it would come to define my year: You know, being brave? Taking charge and vanquishing, uh, icky stuff? (And later, for all the times I told the story of starting my day by sweeping up the post-party-confetti-canon detritus and throwing away the half-used Solo cups before my roommates woke up: Doing rather thankless work for a greater good?) I’m not sure I mastered the art of “manifesting” in 2018, though (sorry Oprah!); I certainly wasn’t as generous or industrious as those stories would suppose, but the image of me resisting something frightening then eventually/begrudgingly giving in and being grateful I did — I suppose that rings true.

It’s easy for me to be blue in December — to think about what didn’t get accomplished, the ways I have been selfish, shallow and lazy — but if I’m honest with myself, the year had its share of success. I got hired out of my temp status, spoke on a panel at a conference, helped lead a project I’m proud of, talked on some podcasts, survived my college reunion. I learned a lot about commitment, complacency and what drives my writing. I spent a lot of time with my family. I watched people I love make incredible art, find cherished partners, move their careers forward, get engaged, become parents. I wrote a couple good songs, played a lot of good shows. My hair got long enough to wear it in a bun most days.

The truth is that I’m pretty scared about the future. Call it cyclical energy or call it the brink of exhaustion but I think things are going to happen in 2019; I think, for better or for worse, I’m going to make them happen. I’m trying to transmute anxiety into excitement for what the year’s bringing but I think it’s ok to be scared, too. Anyway, here’s to 2018, and to the things I felt and saw and did and loved that helped me make it through. 

Andrea Long Chu’s writing

I read “On Liking Women” in January — the kind of article where you start it at your desk and then have to finish it later, and you get home and sit on the couch without even turning the living room lights on and just read and read, breathlessly, until it’s done — and I got hooked and I have read everything ALC has written since. Her work is thoughtful, engaging, provocative, breathtaking, earnest, shady, queer as h*ck. It has made me think about what kind of writer (and person) I want to be and was fodder for some of my favorite conversations I had this year about gender, power, identity and the ultimate self-own. Also, her Twitter is hilarious.

Dried mango

Snack of the year for me, hands down. Though if I’m being honest, green tea kit kats are a serious contender, too -- much tougher to find, though, meaning they can’t quite nab the top snack spot for 2018.

Traveling & open space

I didn’t travel a ton this year but the few trips I took were lovely. In April I visited Seattle, a city I love, for a truly marvelous conference and I saw the water and the mountains. In October I visited Vermont, had a real dream-come-true moment in a field of goats. I visited Sam in Austin and realized that Texas is, indeed, huge. (And affordable!) I visited my family in MA a lot and rode horses a couple times but mostly just sat on the couch with my mom watching re-runs of The Office and making sense of ourselves. It felt nice when I was in motion this year.

Riding my bike

Speaking of motion! I borrowed my sister’s cool bike last year and started riding to work, but then the bike got stolen, which put a big damper on everything. I got a crappy replacement a couple months later and rode it to work every day, nearly, of 2018, and to all sorts of other places. I read Jessica Hopper’s book about Chicago this year and so much of that book takes place on her bike, which inspired me to take things a little more seriously. I’m not an experienced cyclist by any means (truly: most of my bike rides are on two streets in the one-mile radius between my house and my office) but I like what it affords me.

Trying to be a void

that is to say, wearing all black. I know that clothing is how a lot of people express themselves but mostly what I wanted to express this year was: a black hole. By black hole I mostly mean nothingness, and also deflecting the gaze. Incredibly comforting. As a caveat: Mads taught me about the power of navy blue late this year, and I think in 2019 I will try to be the night sky. 

New York

I used to hate NYC for boring reasons but now I don’t, and it defined my year, in many ways — I visited about once a month, for work and for friends and for fun. I nearly always stayed with Mads in Bed-Stuy, which is an excellent situation, although one time I blew a big chunk of a bonus (!) on a fancy hotel room (!!) in Manhattan. (Worth it!) I spoke on a panel, I played my songs in a gallery, I ate bagels with vegan cream cheese, I had bad pizza in a cigar bar, I saw Maggie Nelson give a talk, I watched Duster play two consecutive comeback shows. I had a lot of small moments, too, of bliss and kindness and serendipity, of tortellini soup and espresso tonics, late night talks, doing laps around Bryant Park, walking quietly through galleries. I cried on buses, got freaked out on a plane, had a particularly memorable set of conversations on the Amtrak. I also saw Carly Rae Jepsen!

Playing covers with friends

Ok, yes, seeing Carly Rae at the Turning the Tables event in NYC was magnificent, but more magnificent was being in Gnarly Rae Jepsen, aka the Carly Rae Jepsen cover band I was invited to join around Halloween. Frankly I was just flattered to have been asked, since Lars does a cover band for Halloween every year and they always rip. And Gnarly Rae ripped! I didn’t do a lot of stuff with my own music this year, so it was great to play with a band with pretty much zero pressure and an abundance of good vibes. The Halloween show was one of the happiest moments of my year. Plus this winter I planned a December open mic and so some friends and I decided to do a couple covers — “Silver Springs” by Fleetwood Mac (which Mads sang) and “Dreams” by The Cranberries (which I sang) — which was a little messy and extremely fun.

Christmas cactus

A friend of mine from grad school moved to California after graduating and gave me a bunch of her plants, including a cactus that looked like it was in poor health but I was determined to keep alive for as long as I could. I kept caring for it even though I was convinced it was going to croak any day; turns out I’m just ignorant about what a healthy cactus looks like, because it blossomed just days before my birthday this April. I didn’t even know this cactus could flower, so to have it happen right before I turned 26 made me feel such a deep sense of joy and hope, and connection with the living world, like a true, grounded, healthy Taurus. It bloomed again before Christmas; last week, I realized my grandmother has the exact same plant in her living room.

Writing criticism

I wrote a couple things this year I was especially proud of, and most of them were reviews. (My Turning the Tables essay doesn’t fit in that category but I’m really proud of that, too.) Most of this writing happened in my house where I was alone in my room rubbing my temples and whining softly why is this so hard, why does it have to be so hard but it also felt electric and life-affirming; I heard a podcaster refer to writing as something like “touching the divine” this year and that feels like it, exactly. I think I loved those processes too because they so often involved having really fun, challenging conversations about the art in question with people I admire, and that’s why I got into this game, right? Plus a few conversations I had this year adjacent to these pieces helped me realize that a) criticism is the kind of writing I feel the most drawn to right now; and as we used to say on Tumblr, “not to get fake deep but,” b) the goodness I am searching for in my life/self is a big part of what drives me to write, of what I’m doing in my writing. That helps.

Coffee O merch

My forever favorite coffee shop is Coffee Obsession in Falmouth, not necessarily because they have the best beans in the world or anything but because when I’m there it’s because I am spending time in my favorite place, usually with my family and best friends, etc. Anyway I have recently started to rep them on a regular basis: I got a purple HydroFlask with the Coffee O logo and used it every day this year to bring iced coffee to work, and this summer I bought a big green Coffee O t-shirt that says “LOCAL FLAVAH” on the back (incredible), which is more or less my favorite item of clothing I bought this year. I guess I’m kind of a poseur because I’m a tourist, not a Cape Cod native, but my love for Coffee O is true and real and I’m glad to spread the word.

Etc: Making iced coffee every morning in the Chemex; roséwave and the #Saltypod, both of which I love fiercely; the difference between being liked and being heard, à la Ellen Willis; editing essays; the Fever Ray show at 9:30 Club; wearing glitter in the corners of my eyes; “no one is going to wait for you to ask for permission”; wearing heels to work; the steam room at the W St YMCA; my tarot deck; the Pome newsletter.

[kimvtae]

Drag Me Down (To Hell) - End

Hello, everyone~

I wish I had better news regarding this fanfic, but if you know me at all then you’d probably know that this post was a long time coming.

So without further ado, it’s time for me to explain why I’m going to be abandoning Drag Me Down.

As people who’ve been following me for a while, you probably remember last summer, when I was studying in Korea and soon after I got home, a bunch of writers that I looked up to on this site (foolishly, might I add, as I’ve learned that they’re all assholes) suddenly threw me under the bus and made it look like I was a bully who���d attacked everyone. Of course, I’m not denying that I did call some bitches asshole bitches, but!

I can’t blame my lack of motivation for this account entirely on that instance, as I really don’t give a flying fuck what a bunch of gross people think about me, but if you’ve followed me then you know that I now hate x reader fics.

I hate x reader fics and I hate the entire x reader community except for like 2 people, just about everyone is two-faced and terrible. A lot of people steal ideas (my sub!guk fic that I posted, only for someone else to post the exact same thing not even 2 weeks later) and perpetuate gross stereotypes for the idols they write for and it’s honestly so exhausting even contemplating continuing to ever write for this account. I used to love this writing community, but upon learning that a bunch of weak-willed people hide behind their high follower counts and send their anons after people that they have issues with, I began to see this community as what it really is: toxic and debilitating

I’m sorry if this seems harsh, but the reality is that a few terrible, toxic people ruined this side of the fandom for me, a place where I made really good friends, and I’m still a little peeved.

Enough about my prolonged bitterness at the awful people a lot of innocent readers look up to.

I really did want to finish dmd, as it was my first multi-chaptered fic and I know a lot of you were looking forward to the last few chapters and how the entire thing would play out. Unfortunately, you can see that I don’t have the motivation to continue. It took me a month to write Limitless at 10k words, it took 2 weeks to write a 27.8k fic for my other account, and then one day for a different, 8k word fic.

But I don’t want to leave you guys hanging, so I’ll explain what was going to happen:

the next chapter was to start with everyone in a meeting, trying to figure out where eunhye could be and how to keep surin safe

taehyung receives a package with his parent’s eyes and knows it’s from eunhye, gets into a fight with jeongguk over it and over the oc’s involvement in everything, calls him out for not keeping everyone safe like he said he would and leaves

jeongguk makes the decision to move surin out of the country, to get her into hiding until he can locate eunhye

oc spends the night in surin’s room to calm her down, bites her tongue against telling surin what’s going to happen

in the morning, oc asks jeongguk what his plan is, but he says it’ll be better if she doesn’t know. that way if anything goes wrong no one can use her against him. and if he doesn’t come back, she can’t accidentally reveal his intentions

oc and jimin take surin to school like usual

after dropping surin off in class, bogum finds oc leaving the school and tells her that eunhye got to the house and jeongguk has ordered everyone to the safe house to plan their attack, that he already moved surin to the car out back

oc follows bogum out, doesn’t recognize the van he’s driving and asks where surin is. he knocks her out.

jeongguk gets a call hours later, when surin is supposed to be getting home and he hasn’t heard from the oc in too long. it’s from bogum, saying he has both of them and the only way to get one of them back is to give eunhye what she wants- a hidden, sealed vault of jeongguk’s father’s that he constantly bragged had some of the most valuable and famous artwork ever stolen

jeongguk refuses. calls taehyung but doesn’t get an answer, calls bogum again and doesn’t get an answer

he searches through the files and information he has at his whereabouts to look for clues to where eunhye could be keeping surin and oc

realizes it’s his club, inferno. when he arrives with a few other trusted guys (mostly bts members) the club is on fire

oc manages to break the ropes on her wrists where she’s being tied up but she’s having difficulty getting surin, tied in a different room, free. half of the place is on fire, supporting beams are starting to fall and oc doesn’t know if she can get both of them out

jeongguk saves them blah blah blah

moves surin to the safe house hidden in daegu, still can’t reach taehyung. he gets into contact with eunhye and they set up a meeting at han river for that night

jeongguk tries to send oc to the safe house, too, but she refuses. so jeongguk allows her to go with jimin and the others to take back the base that bogum and the other traitors had taken over

they kiss before separation like all the gross hetero movies

jeongguk gets to han river, is wary because he knows there must be a trap. gets a call. it’s taehyung. eunhye has him restrained on the bridge.

scene cut to oc and the bts boys, they all engage in a shoot out with the traitors and she shows off her new skill in shooting.

back to jeongguk, he climbs the steps to the bridge and runs about halfway across the river and comes across taehyung, tied to a chair and dangling over the river. he’d fall if not for the thin rope keeping the chair up

says he’ll get taehyung out of there but just then eunhye attacks him

her fighting style is primitive, mostly because jeongguk’s father’s gas weapon attacks against her decades ago weakened her hands and she can’t use guns or new age weapons very well

jeongguk is close to losing the fight, several times they almost jostle taehyung right off the bridge

taehyung shouts something just before a sneak attack by eunhye, the reminder of a move the two of them did together when taehyung first started working for jeongguk, and jeongguk knows how to dodge the move and send eunhye falling off the bridge

jeongguk unties taehyung, taehyung calls him an idiot but they’re both fond (spoiler alert they used to bone) they leave han river to get to the meeting point

reunion and all that jazz, oc and the rest of the guys were able to stave off the traitors

oc says she can’t do this right now, tells jeongguk she’ll go away for grad school and when she comes back she’ll make the decision whether it’s right for her to get involved with a mob boss and his daughter

jeongguk cleans up the loose ends while she’s studying abroad

oc comes back to jeongguk and surin waiting at the airport for her, missed them and all that gross shit

they do end up together and probably have more kids and other gross shit

the end !

Again, I am so sorry to everyone who was eagerly awaiting an update for this story. I’d rather stop writing it entirely than put forth half-assed updates that I hated more than anything.

You are all more than welcome to follow me on twitter, where I’m a little more active than here. I’ll try to be a bit more active here now that I don’t feel pressured to write for this account. If, for some reason, you’d like to continue reading my fics, you can ask off anon for my ao3, where I mostly post taekook right now, soon to be yoonkook, taegi, hopekook, ect.

Thank you all for the kind messages and praise for the fic. My kind readers are the reasons I tried so hard to force myself to continue to write this fic, but ultimately I am going to have to say goodbye.

I hope you can all understand and accept my decision. Thank you.

[ravenclawgirrl]

5 years after the tassel turn, where am I?

It's graduation season!

Contrary to the usual scenario during this time of the year, commencement exercises now happen virtually and gone are the days where we line up to do the most awaited march. While it may seem different now, graduations will always be a reason to celebrate. 

It's been over 5 years since I earned my degree in communication. Looking back, it still feels like anew. I could still remember how as a fresh grad, everything feels exciting. I was so ecstatic to meet the world - to visit places, earn my own money and be a yuppie in my chosen industry.

Lucky are those who were already certain of where they intend to be the moment they stepped out of the graduation rites. Myself, not included.

I started my working career as a Customer Solutions Officer under the giant telco, Smart Communications Inc. Here, I became part of the most advanced digital hub of the company where I serve as a front liner catering to the needs of walk-in subscribers. My job here was to retain our customers and deliver great customer experience.  Yep, totally not my line. I was also puzzled how I ended up here. Perhaps, it’s the pressure, “how come everybody else is already hitching on their first job?” My bad.

Frankly, I already knew how it's going to be a temporary job from the very start. But it was certainly good while it did last. I was coerced to face and serve clients of different kinds during my time here. More than that, I was trained to be more patient and compassionate towards strangers. It also taught me to practice compartmentalization to be able to function well. My first job paid really well that it allowed me to travel often and afford luxurious gadgets and alike. As a matter of fact, I could confidently say now that should I have stayed here and never left, I might now be ready to sustain my own family.

Hence, after spending over a year with the very draining mall shifts, holiday work and endless customer service, I've decided to cut my time off and quit.

My next job kicked off around Q4 of 2017. Another high-paying job, no more mall shifts and holiday duties. In this company, I've experienced living the real makati-corporate-slave-life. Long UV queues, horrible traffic etc. But this time around, I did not last longer than three months. My reasons were simple - I don't see myself growing in this kind of environment. And so, I left.

At this point, you must say that I'm privilege enough to just leave with no back-up plans. I was and I won't lie. I still felt too young to be making serious career decisions back then. It was 2018 and I was just a young and clueless 21 year old.

I've started having problems finding my next job. I became sick of attending job interviews and my heart felt really lost on where should I go. Being unsure of where I wanna be, I opened the idea of doing something I've long wanted to do - join theatre.

I remember hearing a mass that one particular Saturday night when my thoughts suddenly wandered far. I've always been a fan of the industry but I know so little about how it works. So with all the courage from my anxious heart, I took a leap of hope. I stumbled upon a musical theatre workshop offered by Repertory Philippines where I found myself enrolling very soon.

I gambled the remaining backpay of my two previous job to this workshop. Luckily, I was in good hands. Little by little, I became more aware of the industry and the possibilities. I met a handful of people who helped me understand this world I’m trying to fit in. Soon enough, another workshop from Atlantis Theatrical transpired and I saw myself enlisting again out of the littlest money left in my pocket.

To sustain myself, I've tried applying for work-from-home jobs. I've accepted writing gigs and some freelance jobs that would make money. Although I don't earn as much as a regular job, at least, it felt productive. However, It is important to acknowledge the contribution of my parents when I've come to follow my heart's desire. Without their assistance, I could not frankly sustain any of these quite decently.

Theatre then, became my home. I was truly at my happiest. It awakened my burning passion to be on stage. At this point, around three years after the tassel turn, I finally found the place where I wanna be. It took me that long, but I'm still glad I did.

Hence, it isn't really as easy as it looks. Joining around this age, getting myself a space in the industry is a challenge. Possible, but a really difficult one. Attending a handful of auditions as a neophyte didn't really become effective too soon. I've realized how I must be more well-equipped if I really discern to stay. I need more lessons and training that would help me in enhancing my skills and increasing my knowledge. After some time, I found another theatre program that would help me in this goal. University of the Philippines Diliman offers a Master of Arts in Theatre Arts.  

After coursing through the module with high hopes, I've mustered the courage to work on the requirements and prayed to get in. My claim was simple - if this is for me, it will be. A month after my submission, I received my acceptance letter.

And so, I became a student once again. I literally went far for my dreams. Being a south girl all my life, QC is definitely a stranger to me. I found myself scouting dorm in Katipunan ready to live independently! At this point, most of my college batch mates are probably either receiving career promotions, purchasing their first huge investments or simply starting their own family. 

Meanwhile, I've only started climbing the ladder of my dreams. But one thing's for sure, I was totally happy. I never felt the need to compare myself to anyone. We all have different timelines and I totally trust mine.

I immerse myself to more plays. I observe more people who made it. I feed my soul with anything but theatre hoping to collect inspiration from these. I make sure to make use of all my available time for the goal. I remember often reminding myself before that my stay at UP should serve me well - that I should maximize all the lesson I could get from every class, interaction or even normal conversation. True enough, my stay was worth the while.

During my first year in UP, everyday became a learning experience as I got to be more involved with the community. I've also realized how I've wanted to take on different tracks and explore promising potentials. Some of the classes gave me a preview of my desire for the academe so I could go as far as teaching skillful scholars with little to no access to mainstream theatre. A totally different story perhaps. Since then, I doubled my hard work to gain more opportunities.

In the pursuit of my dreams, I've become more independent. I learned more life hacks, became more interested in kitchen works, taught myself how to do my own show make-up and further enhanced all the skills I've got to be able to make it work.

Summer of 2019, I landed on a stage management internship with Atlantis Theatrical. My first professional theatre exposure that further ignited my burning love for this craft. I never went home empty-handed but with a pocket full of worthy learnings rather. I got to work with some of my most looked-up PH Theatre icons and each day is a different kind of ride. 

Soon after finishing this internship, I was immediately offered to do a  paid gig as an Assistant Stage Manager and the rest is history. This marked the start of my freelance gigs that revolved around on-site events. I get paid to do on-site coordination, logistic works and all the kinds. Along with this, I still continued attending VTRs, showing up on auditions and joining free workshops when I can. This year also kicked start my experience of performing on kiddie parties in character costumes every weekend through PWJ.  On the side, I sometimes win small acting gigs for short films and student prods. I still earn a little compare to my two previous jobs but with all the experience I have in my hands at this point, I'm definitely happier.

To be in theatre meant facing multiple rejections normally. And having to undergo e so much in a short span, showing up on audition already takes a huge ball of courage. I was truly blessed to get myself a tight but really strong circle of support system that helps me all the time when things start to get rough. The process, the tiring process. 

So it's not surprising that by end of 2019, I felt the need to rethink. After a year of endless auditions, finally, I got my first callback! But it was a very untimely season to get rejected again afterwards. The turn of things paved the way for me to rest a little. 

The pay is not going any better and I'm running out of energy to give. The passion  and hard work that I've been devoting won't solely pay my bills. Perhaps, it wasn't something I cannot simply shrug away.  Because of this, my grad school performance also got affected. This pushed me to pause. I had a quick realignment and reality check. How long will I allow myself to stay in uncertainty?

It is a pretty painful decision. But come Q1 of 2020, I found myself taking a leave on my grad school and applying for a stable corporate job again. After a long while, I came searching my closet for blazers and skirts again when for years, I filled it with nothing but black production clothes and rehearsal attires. I saw myself attending another set of job interview inside meeting rooms after a ton of casting calls and audition venues. 

Although, I was pretty sure it's for the best. After all, I convinced myself that it's only going to be a meaningful rest. Soon enough, I'll be back on and offstage when I can freely fund my dreams.

SMDC was my first huge corporate experience. Here, as a Marketing and Events Supervisor, I was tasked to oversee CSR projects execution around SMDC properties. With a background in Stage Management, it didn't become too difficult. My Customer Service experience also helped my job of connecting to a number of residents more handy.

During my stay with the company, I was tapped to be the official voice of the SMDC hotline. Not quite sure if it pushed through after I left but all I remember is the feeling of satisfaction to be at-least doing a little talent sharing alongside my marketing job.

Being back in a stable job that pays well, I got to save more and finally invest again. Small achievements led to another until I got the hang of it. Unfortunately, things turned sour between me and my immediate head causing me to leave the good company unexpectedly. A totally different story again but for what it's worth, I'm really glad it happened.

The pandemic hit the country and getting a job is now more difficult than it has ever been. After 8 exhausting months of working for this corporation, I've decided to rest for quite some time. two months to be exact. Until, my current job found me.

I now work as an Events Specialist at a local PR agency. With various background and a pretty diverse experience, I initially thought  that I may know enough of what I'll be doing. But being in this job hastily proved me wrong - there is so much more to discover!

For some coward reasons, I never dreamed of working for an agency back in college. But the way of things brought me here pushing me to believe that I am destined to do this. My current job focuses on conceptualizing online and offline events for different brands, client servicing, sourcing suppliers and everything in between. Which is, safe to say, demands a portion of all I've learned from all the jobs I've done. Could be exhausting most times but a validation of my versatility to which I enjoyed most. 

In a span of 5 years, my career trajectory came really far. From Retail, Corporate, Marketing, Freelancing, Grad School, Production and now Agency - who would've thought? Yet, I ain't even really where I desire to be. I couldn't also grasp the fact of how far my combined spontaneity and dreams have led me sometimes.  5 years after the tassel turn, one could expect a really huge win. But I'm sorry to break it - there isn't anything grand to reveal. Hence, I'm quite satisfied knowing that I continue to be a progressive student of life.  Checking on where I am now, it feels fair.  I may not be exactly where I wish to be, but I am who I've decided to be. I've paid so much price to be the woman I am now, thus, my most important investment.

I definitely know nothing of what the future holds. But I'm certain that we are exactly where we are meant to be. So if any reader gets to this point of my story, i hope you get to embrace the job that puts food on your table. It might not be that job yet but sooner, it'll all make sense.

--

Please let me know if you've read this. Makes me so much happy that I get readers. Share me your story too and I'll gladly listen!  xx

[iamanartichoke]

It’s almost 4am, I can’t sleep because of Reasons, and my brain isn’t functioning enough to be productive, so I’m just gonna fill out this writing meme. So, yeah, if you’re interested in some very long, self-indulgent writing babble, keep reading, and if you’re on mobile, I’m sorry the cut doesn’t work. 

1. What are your favourite genres and/or styles to write in?

Contemporary lit has always been my thing. I was never really into reading or writing much action/adventure or fantasy, which is weird because I was very into shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and LOST - but, I was mostly into those shows for the very rich character dynamics and developments, so. Anyway, Sanctuary is the first thing I’ve written in my life that isn’t in the contemporary, real-world genre and I’m doing okay with it, but I do sometimes get a little paranoid that it’s too character focused with not enough action/comic-genre stuff going on. This is really stepping outside of the box for me, to be honest. 

(I just remembered that I did write some Batman fanfic when I was maybe 16  or so, but I’m not sure it counts bc it was terrible and I pretty much just wrote  a Buffy-esque character to be Batman’s sappy love interest. God, how embarrassing.) 

2. What was the last writing project you finished and felt successful with?

Okay, so, when I was finishing grad school, I had to complete a “publishable” thesis project and mine is/was this collection of linked short stories that I spent probably a good year and a half (including my thesis semester) working on. Technically, I did finish it enough that it passed the graduation requirements, and I have been chipping away at it on and off since then, but after I graduated, I just ... stopped writing, in general. Depression and real life are a shitty combination for writers with very little internal motivation. But, despite that, this collection holds a very dear place in my heart. There are seven stories total, all young adult, coming-of-age themed, and they’re linked by character in that they all take place in a small town and the characters from each story sort of know each other in passing, as happens in a small town. There’s room for ten stories, because it’s a nice, even number. I love all of the characters and I think it could be something really great and could be published successfully - just, it needs a lot more work to get to that point. Eventually it will. Anyway, yes, that’s my last “finished” writing project and I do feel a modicum of success toward it, for what it’s worth. 

3. If you have a WiP how do you feel it’s going? What stage are you in?

I am actually 85% pleased with how Sanctuary is going. I started writing the fic without any real idea of what I wanted to do with it or where it would go - I was just having a lot of Loki feels during a difficult time in my life. Prior to this, I would handle my Character Feels by indulging in a lot of watches and re-watches and occasionally making music videos and sometimes fan art (graphics, I can’t draw for shit), but these methods just weren’t cutting it this time ... and hence, fic was born. 

It’s not a perfect story, of course - there are some inconsistencies and errors and the writing can always be more polished, but I’m just happy that I’ve stuck with it for this long and allowed it to develop the way that it has. I’m able to flex my writing muscles and get back into the practice of it while having fun at the same time. The story is four chapters away from completion, but I have plans for a sequel and also a couple of one-shots from Thor’s POV that I want to play around with. Overall, I’m pretty pleased with where I am in my little fic-verse right now. 

When it comes to original fiction, aside from the aforementioned short story collection, I am in the plotting stages of a novel involving reincarnation, because I am tropey trash, but it has potential. So, there’s that. 

4. What are your favourite places to write?

I actually feel like I write more productively when I am away from my apartment, which is a conundrum because I pretty much only leave my apartment to go to work or, like, the grocery store. I have a job that allows me to be at a computer for most of the day, so when I’m not busy, I like to write at work. I weirdly feel more productive and clear-headed at desktop computers, but I don’t have one of my own, so when I’m not at work or at the library, I write on my laptop in places like Barnes and Noble or laying in bed like a lazy bum. I do have a desk at home, but it is woefully neglected, I’m sad to say. 

5. Do you prefer to write with long hand or type? Or some other method?

9 times out of 10, I type. However, when I am struggling particularly hard with writer’s block, I’ll write long hand because, for whatever reason, switching methods jolts my brain a little bit and gets the juices flowing again. I wrote the entirety of the Kree battle and Val/Loki in the infirmary (I forget what chapter that was) long hand, among other scenes. 

6. Do you remember your first character? If so can we meet them?

My childhood is filled to the brim with embarrassing fiction. I don’t remember my first character, to be honest - I remember being in fourth grade and writing some kind of story for Young Author’s Day at school, and that’s the first thing I remember even writing, but I couldn’t tell you what the story was or who the characters were to save my life. When I was in sixth grade, I discovered S.E. Hinton’s books, and from that point on, I spiraled down into the genre of coming-of-age, tortured, sad protagonists (God, Ponyboy Curtis was my first spirit animal, talk about tragic) and I’ve never quite looked back. 

7. Where do you get your inspiration?

Where don’t I get my inspiration, would be a better question. Music is a big inspiration - sometimes I’ll hear a lyric that I want to put to a story, or a song will have a storyline that I like and that’ll get the creative juices flowing. I do get some inspiration from real life, but I shy away from writing anything too closely related to my own life - things that I pull from my life are incredibly fictionalized, but the roots are sometimes there, if that makes sense. Movies and TV shows, of course, especially with character types that I’m drawn to. Other people’s literature is a big inspiration, too. Idk, I think inspiration just comes from everywhere. Everyone and everything has a story that can be told. 

8. Do you outline a story before writing it, or does it all live in your head until the first draft gets put down?

I’m kind of 75/25 on this - 75% lives in my head and 25% is outlined, but the outline is always kind of a loose guideline that may end up completely changing by the time the words are actually on the page. I mostly use outlines to put things down tangibly when they get too cluttered in my head and I start confusing myself. I also use outlines to keep track of plot threads, to try to keep things consistent. For Sanctuary, my outline is a mixture of what I want to accomplish in each chapter and an extensive notes section on various canon I’m using, so that I can keep things straight. 

9. Where do you go/ What do you do when you’re feeling stuck?

Writing long-hand is a thing I already talked about. Other things I find helpful: going for a long drive to just sort of let myself zone out and think about the story without the pressure of sitting at the computer, listening to music ... sometimes I just put the story away completely and let it sit while I do/focus on other things, and I come back to it refreshed and ready to try again. 

10. What got you starting writing/doing Art? (Because I always love origin stories)

I don’t know - writing has just always been a part of who I am. The urge to write was something that came very naturally to me. I’m sure being a voracious reader was part of it, too - I grew up reading books like there was no tomorrow, and I was a very introverted, shy child, so I read more than I talked to people, and that just sort of naturally translated into writing stories of my own. I’ve never been a people-person in that I don’t like interacting with people much (in real life, anyway) but I like to examine and think about how people work, and it’s a strange thing but so it goes. But yeah - there’s no real “origin story” with me, just a long history of being a reclusive nerd. 

I guess this is a tagging meme but I wasn’t tagged, so if anyone out there wants to do it, feel free, I’d love to read other people’s responses if you feel like sharing them. :) 

[sending-the-message]

What Lies Beneath - Chapter 1 by JadeThorne

The year was 1997.

I remember it as if it happened yesterday.

I was two years out of my second round of grad school, having finished a doctorate as an oceanographer. I already had a doctorate in marine biology, and wanted to have oceanography under my belt as well.

It’s tough being a woman in a man’s world.

I was working at Scripp’s, in San Diego. It made sense to accept their offer of a job as a researcher once I’d finished my doctorate there, and within two years I was bumped up to the title “research professional.” It was a well-paying job, if not a particularly exciting one. The hours were sometimes long, but I was content.

My office had a large window that overlooked the Pacific, year-round. On days I had spare time, I found myself standing at the window and staring out at the great vastness of it. There was so much life in those waters. Life we didn’t quite understand, or hadn’t discovered just yet.

Much to my husband’s good-natured amusement, I spent a great deal of my off-time at the ocean as well. I would walk the beach, my eyes scanning those sometimes-turbulent waters along with the shoreline and my ears tuning in to every last sound. The smell of the salty air was like perfume to me.

If you were to ask my parents, they might smile and joke that I’d been born in the water and a Selkie had brought me to their door.

The ocean … the ocean was my calling. It was in my blood.

A knock came at the door to my office late one afternoon, right as I was finishing up notes for Dr. Brame. Curious, I called for them to enter. A young man in faded jeans and a blue shirt entered, smiling.

“Dr. Masume, I presume?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yes, how may I help you?”

“I’m Todd Blevins,” he introduced, extending his hand to me. “I just had a conversation with Dr. Brame, and he suggested I come to you with my proposal.”

Now my interest was piqued. I raised my eyebrow, indicating that he continued.

“I work with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,” he began, setting into a chair at my desk. “Recently we picked up some noises that we aren’t sure what they are. Now, Dr. Fox doesn’t think it’s a living creature, but some of us aren’t so sure. So, we’re planning to make a couple of dives, to see if we find anything. We need a good, competent marine biologist-slash-oceanographer to round out our team of six, and so here I am.”

“Doesn’t NOAA already have marine biologists and oceanographers working there, though?” I asked, skeptical.

“They do, but … well most of them think our little excursion is a waste of time and aren’t interested in going along,” he answered. “Dr. Masume, you will be very well-compensated. My team will pay you fifty thousand for your time, even if we only dive once.”

Fifty thousand dollars was a hell of a lot of money to offer on a gamble – that much I knew. “Why so much?” I asked. “What aren’t you telling me, Mr. Blevins?”

“Todd, please,” he offered. “There’s a good chance we may have to dive the Trench, Dr. Masume.”

The Mariana Trench was a crescent-shaped scar on the ocean floor, some one hundred twenty-odd miles from the Mariana Islands. It had been dived before, but the thought of experiencing it first-hand left me feeling torn between excitement and unease. It would take hours to reach the bottom, and the pressure was unbelievable – over fifteen thousand PSI. It would take one hell of a strong submersible to withstand the pressure.

“Do you actually have a sub strong enough to make that dive without killing us all?” I asked bluntly.

He nodded immediately. “We do, Dr. Masume. I would not ask you to go on a suicide mission.”

I turned to the ocean beyond my office, mulling his words over. “I will need to discuss this with my husband,” I said, though I had already made the decision silently.

I was going, whether my husband approved or not.

Todd nodded and rose to his feet, fishing a card from his pocket. “I can be reached directly at that number,” he told me. “If we don’t hear from you by this time tomorrow, we’ll understand.”

I thanked him and saw him out, and then sat down at my desk in a mild state of shock. This was the opportunity of a lifetime. But why had Dr. Brame suggested me? I owed him my notes anyhow, so I picked them up and walked to his office.

After getting the assent to enter, I walked in to find him smiling at me.

“Lily,” he greeted. “Have a seat, please.”

I sat down, placing the research notes on his desk.

“You’re wondering why I picked you,” he said, matter-of-factly. “The truth is fairly simple – your youth and your knowledge. You are the youngest double-major we have here at current, and your mind is as sharp as a tack. You don’t miss anything, Lily.” He smiled again. “Besides, I can hear the sea, my girl. I know it’s been whispering for you. You need to do this.”

It was the first time I’d ever heard Dr. Brame hint at anything vaguely Otherworldly, and it caught me off. “You hear … the sea,” I echoed.

“Everything has a voice, if you listen long enough,” he said, nodding slowly. “Whether you go or not, there’s an opening for an on-hands professor coming up in a couple of weeks. Means you’ll be spending your time out there instead. But I really hope you go. Opportunity like this, it doesn’t come around too often.”

“I’m going,” I heard myself say. “I may find myself divorced over this, but I’m going.”

Dr. Brame smiled broadly. “Good choice,” he murmured. “I think that husband of yours will be more understanding than you think. I like him. He’s got a good head on his shoulders.”

“Thank you, doctor,” I expressed. “For everything you’ve done for me. This … You’re right. I can’t pass this up. It’s not about the money, either.”

“What did they offer you, out of curiosity?” he asked, leaning back in his chair.

I blew out a breath. “A ridiculous amount – fifty thousand, whether we dived once or a dozen times.”

He whistled. “Hell of a lot of money for an expedition,” he remarked. “Well, go on. Go home and tell him what fell in your lap today. And call that boy so he doesn’t have time to talk to anyone else about this.”

My husband was, as Dr. Brame predicted, a lot more agreeable about my going than I expected.

Of course, it could have been the nice bonus I was going to get at the end of it, but I didn’t want to think the man I’d married might be a bit more materialistic than I thought.

When I made the call to Todd, I could hear him hopping up and down over the phone that I had agreed to go.

“Oh, that’s excellent, Dr. Masume!” he exclaimed.

“Lily, Todd,” I offered. “If we’re going to be working together like this, call me Lily.”

“Lily, then,” he said. “We were thinking of starting the expedition on Monday, if that’s acceptable to you. I can make arrangements with Dr. Brame, if you want.”

I smiled. “Monday sounds fine, and Dr. Brame won’t be an issue,” I admitted. “He expects me to go, so I think he won’t mind my starting on Monday.”

“Excellent,” Todd said. “We’ll plan on seeing you Monday at eight am, then.”

“Oh, where am I meeting you at?” I asked, realizing he hadn’t given me a location.

“We’ll pick you up,” he told me. “You aren’t that far from our facility, so it’s not a problem.”

That was Thursday night.

Monday morning saw me ready to go by seven forty-five, and a somewhat battered Wrangler pulled into the drive at five till. I walked out, locking up behind me, and couldn’t help the smile at Todd’s excited face behind the wheel. I couldn’t resist teasing him as I got into the Jeep, though. “Fifty grand, and you’re driving this?”

“Hey, now,” he said, smirking. “I’ve had her since I was eighteen. She’s been good to me, so why trade her in for something new?”

I nodded. “I can understand that.”

“The plan is to go out with our sub to an approximate location the sound was heard from and dive there,” he told me as he navigated the early morning traffic. “Stuart’s gonna stay on the ship, along with Rob and the rest of their team. You’ll be diving with myself, Pat, and Yoshi.”

“Yoshi Nakagachi?” I asked, curious. When he nodded, I raised an eyebrow. “I remember reading some of his work when I was working on my thesis for my marine biology degree.”

Todd nodded. “Yoshi’s a cool guy – I’m glad he agreed to go with us. Pat’s pretty cool too – he’s an older dude. Well, not that Yoshi isn’t, but Pat’s more like the adopted uncle of the group.” He made a turn down a road that I could see led to docks. “Stuart and Rob are nice, but they don’t talk much. They’ll be keeping track of us while we’re down, and recording the data topside. Our sub has two pretty decent underwater cameras attached, so I’m hoping for some photos to send up to them.”

“Tell me about the sub we’re diving in,” I prompted.

“Well, she’s about twenty feet long, and around ten to twelve feet wide,” he began. “We used nine-centimeter ceramic spheres inside the hull for the pressure down there. There’s probably close to a thousand of them in each hull compartment, I estimate. She’ll be tethered to the research ship with a steel cable along with wires to transmit the data. She’s got a joystick to steer her around with, and an oxygen supply for six hours. She’s heated too, because it’s cold down that far.”

I nodded, tucking the information away as he pulled up alongside several other vehicles by the docks.

“Well, let’s go meet everyone and get this show on the road,” he said, smiling as he got out of the Jeep.

Stuart and Rob seemed a bit surprised that I was a woman, but Yoshi and Pat took it all in stride. We made our introductions, I answered questions about my background, and they outlined what they wanted to accomplish that day. It was as Todd said – we’d ride out on the research ship to the site, then dive down in the submersible and see what was what.

I wasn’t nervous at all, not even when we boarded the ship and headed out to sea. I was comfortable with the ocean, with the vastness of it. When we reached the site, and Stuart put the anchor down, I was a bit surprised to feel this little hint of unease. Chiding myself silently, I gathered up the necessary equipment and climbed into the bright-yellow submersible behind Pat.

“Piece of cake,” the older man said, winking at me as he took his station in the submersible.

“Done this before, have you?” I asked.

He grinned at me. “Been down in this girl plenty of times. I was one of the testers when she was built, to ensure she could withstand the pressure. She’s safe.”

“You’ve been in the Trench?” I pushed.

An odd look crossed his face briefly, and he covered it up with another grin. “Sure,” he replied. “Kind of eerie, but nothing to it. Course, we didn’t go all the way to the bottom that day.”

I found his wording somehow less than comforting, and remembered that Todd had told me he wouldn’t invite me along on a suicide mission. Maybe Pat’s odd look was from me asking if he’d been down there after he’d just said he was one of the testers on the sub. Somehow, though, I didn’t really believe that.

And then we were diving.

Yoshi turned the cameras on so we could see what was outside the sub. The quality was better than I expected, and it showed more than I thought it would as well. I watched the monitors, mentally ticking off the different species of fish that swam past.

Then I saw the top of the trench come into view, and that tiny thread of unease came back. “We’re going down today, then?” I asked.

“Sure,” Todd replied.

Gradually, the blue ambient light darkened as we descended, and the lights the cameras were equipped with came on. But even those lights weren’t quite enough to penetrate the darkness in that trench.

“So, tell me, Dr. Masume,” Yoshi began, “what do you see here?”

I focused on the screens, waiting to see something I recognized.

And then we heard something very strange.

If I had to describe the sound, I would have said it was like an enormous bubble leaving to go to the surface. Only, there was no bubble.

“That’s it – that’s the noise?” I asked, forgetting about identifying life for Yoshi.

“Yep,” Pat answered, not looking at me. The big man seemed uneasy, almost like he knew what it was.

“Hey, we need to bring you back up,” Stuart called over the radio. “Got a surprise squall, and she’s moving in fast.”

“Roger that,” Pat radioed back.

“So, what do you think?” Todd asked, grinning.

“I think we’re going to have to dive again, to have a hope of identifying what made that sound,” I replied.

My dreams were strange that night.

I was back in the trench, but it seemed a lot darker than I remembered. I wasn’t in the submersible either – I was swimming, without a mask or oxygen tank. Just ahead of where I was swimming, I could make out a large rock formation that was darker than the rest of the trench. Intrigued, I swam up to it … and an enormous eye snapped open in the formation.

I woke suddenly, sitting straight up in bed and gasping for breath. What the hell was that?

“Babe … you alright?” Luke asked softly, sitting up in concern.

“Yeah,” I told him, still vividly remembering that eye. “Yeah, just a weird dream.”

I didn’t sleep very well after that, and so I was up two hours before I normally would have been. Needing something to do, I got on the computer and started researching the denizens of the trench in hopes of maybe finding a source for my sudden unease. Surely, I had glimpsed one of the more unusual forms of life and forgotten about it, and it had resurfaced in a dream.

But I found nothing. Nothing that came close to explaining what I saw in my dream. And somehow, I didn’t really believe it was just a dream.

When Todd picked me up at eight, I was still subdued.

“You okay, Lily?” he asked, looking at me.

“Todd, what’s down in that trench?” I asked bluntly. “Pat’s uneasy about it, Stuart seems put off by it as well, and the rest of you are too eager to get down there.”

He sighed. “We caught a glimpse of something in camera about six months ago,” he finally said. “I don’t know what it was, but it was big. Scared the shit out of Pat and Stuart both, hell even Rob ain’t too keen on the trench now. Pat’s in the sub because the three of them drew straws and he lost.”

I felt my hair stand on end at those words from him. They saw it, my mind echoed. “I’m going to tell you something, though I’m not sure why,” I heard myself say. “Understand that I am not and have never been prone to strange dreams or nightmares. I don’t do any drugs, not even aspirin, and I’m not a heavy drinker either. Last night, I saw something in my dream. It was huge, blacker than the trench itself, and it looked at me.”

“Holy shit,” Todd muttered, clearly shaken by that. “That’s way too close to what we saw on the camera.” He paused, glancing over at me. “Do you have any ideas, any at all no matter how far-fetched, as to what it may be?”

I thought about that eye, and the formation I’d seen that wasn’t a formation at all. I made myself recall every last detail. “Dragon,” I finally said. “What was in my dream … was a dragon.”

We didn’t talk any more about it on the drive to the research ship. Logically, it wasn’t possible. Dragons did not exist, nor had they ever. It had to just be a dream, and as far as the object their camera picked up, that could have been a fluke. Cameras weren’t perfect – maybe a shark had gotten too close, or some other large variety of fish, and the camera had glitched, so it made it look bigger than it was.

That and dragons, according to the mythos surrounding them, were land creatures. It made no sense that I would dream about one in the trench.

Pushing those thoughts out of my head, I boarded the research ship and noticed that I wasn’t the only one looking under the weather today.

Everyone, even Yoshi, wore almost identical expressions. They looked shell-shocked, with that thousand-yard stare.

What the hell had happened in between when we left and today?

We made the journey out to the dive site in silence, and I couldn’t help wondering what was going to happen this time. An involuntary shiver went through me, catching Pat’s eye.

“Yoshi, I don’t think today’s a good day to go down there,” Pat announced, looking to the lead scientist of the group.

“We must go down today,” Yoshi said, something in his voice sounding obsessive. “Today might be the day we find the source.”

“I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Pat mumbled.

“We will be fine,” Yoshi stated, pushing his glasses further up on his nose. “Our submersible is well-constructed. Our cameras are the best NOAA has to offer. We will be fine.”

Stuart put out the anchor and his team set about making ready to lower us down into the ocean … into the trench itself this time. The thick steel cable that kept us tied to the ship had been inspected twice, and all the wires that transmitted data had been gone over as well. Their team had done their best to ensure our dive was successful, in short.

Yoshi, Pat, Todd and I boarded the submersible, and took our seats. The hatch was sealed, and then we were lowered into the waiting water. This time as we dove down, I didn’t watch the monitors for sea life.

I was afraid of what I might see now.

Down we went, into the Mariana Trench. A counter notified us of how deep we were at any given time. Another machine told us what the pressure was on the sub. Yet another one displayed how much battery life we had to run the equipment, including our precious oxygen and heat. The last one displayed how much oxygen was in the tanks.

I watched those numbers increase, the deeper we descended, and felt suddenly ill. This was a fool’s mission I was on – I was suddenly sure of it, but Yoshi had been quite adamant about going down today so there would be no talking him out of it.

Nearly two hours later, we reached the bottom, oblivious to the very real danger we were in.

Topside, Stuart, Rob, and the entire team watched as our live feed went black.

“What the hell?” Rob muttered, and picked up the radio. “Hey, Yoshi – are you guys alright down there?”

Radio silence. Nothing.

“Yoshi, Todd, Pat, anyone – can you hear me?” he tried again.

But only silence met his ears from the other end.

“Fuck!” he swore, punching the desk. “We’ve got to get them out of there.”

Everyone moved to the enormous winch to start hauling us back up, while Stuart and Rob looked on in worry. The winch moved too freely – it should have been reeling in a lot slower than it was. Then, quite suddenly, the end of the steel cable came out of the water.

Our lifeline had been severed. We were stuck at the bottom of the trench until NOAA came to rescue us.

[anothercity]

Brooke is the best kind of ordinary. Brooke is logical and respectful in a way that an older sibling can only become as a result of lashing out at her younger sister, only to be faced with unconditional, idiotic love. She walks the way most white young women walk, not because it’s a long, necessary part of her day, but because she has something to do—she’s going for coffee, to work, to meet her friends, to buy peanut butter and bananas, to think, and maybe to cry a little bit. There will always be a particular something to be sad about, but this is only allowed to be her primary sadness when all other sadnesses are dealt with and put to rest; once the fight with her boyfriend is over, once she figures out a way to pay for her grad school applications, once she finishes the book by that one author whose inimitable expression of despair is too much to read on the bus. She thinks her only opportunities for satisfying expression are during phone calls to her sister in another city, in another state. Most of the time her biggest complaint comes down to a supposed inability to have the same kind of in-depth, critical, and emotional conversation with whatever young man she’s currently dating as she does with her sister in another city, and it often feels (to both Brooke and her sister in another city) that she’s pushing herself further and further into desperation for meaningful conversation with whoever will listen, despite knowing that there are only one or two people that she wants to listen, and one of those people is dead.

Brooke hasn’t always lived so far away from her sister. Before her sister moved to another city in another state, they lived in the same apartment and had the freedom to waste each other’s time together. Of course, most of their time was spent fighting, because “you can’t just take my shirt, you bitch.”  Most of the time these ridiculous fights were reduced to huffs and glares as one of them left for a friend’s house or the gym, but the rare instances that allowed pettiness to explode into violent, physical, familial rage were undoubtedly unnerving to hear through the walls. At first they wondered if their neighbors thought they were insane, until they overhead (along with tenants in buildings throughout the neighborhood) the alarming nightly shitstorm that was the couple next door. The comparative normalcy was a relief; the recurring question of whether or not to call the police was less reassuring.

Before they lived in the same city and fought most of the time, Brooke was in her fourth year of her undergraduate studies, and her sister was in her first. It was at this point that their distance had been most significant.

On the day that David Bailey died, Brooke’s sister in a another city was the last to find out, as she had been on a train and a plane most of the morning on her way to visit their father, and no one had any way of contacting her, as their father paid the phone bill and this was most likely the last thing on his mind as he was finally afforded a moment to slip away from the pain and suffering that is hospice care. Brooke’s sister in another city wasn’t entirely suspecting that this would be the last trip she would be making back home to see David, but nevertheless that penetrating feeling had been prevalent among all the Bailey children for four months so far. Brooke also lived in a city separate from their father. She was two and half hours away from David, and two hours away from her sister, and her sister three hours away from David. The triangle of time separating them had never really been acknowledged, because Brooke and her sister knew that it was absolutely necessary to continue life as best they knew how, and either one of them moving to either point, reducing their geometry to one sad line, would cost them years in progress of young adulthood. The triangle didn’t need to be acknowledged. They knew David would be disappointed in any selfless efforts to take care of him or each other, as selflessness was not something he taught them—not that it was his goal to keep them selfish, rather he tried to instill in his children a sense of independence and maturity, and this was an unfortunate opportunity to prove their resilience despite their young age. And of course, the tenderness and levity with which he had raised his children (in the few post-divorce years he had with them) were lost. The man who had withered from rotund to pallid in a matter of weeks was not a dad; he had been replaced by some man who sat in the corner at the holiday party, slipping in and out of obvious exhaustion while the host explained across the house that “Oh, that’s David,” to people who had known him for years but could no longer recognize him. Nevertheless, Brooke and her sister struggled to keep levity afloat, if not for his sake then for their own.

It had since become the foremost reason for phone calls between Brooke and her sister.  

Having a sister to walk through the long process of death with you doesn’t make it easier. If anything at all, having a sister does make the process less tiresome, but nonetheless painful. Their experiences and emotions were mirrored in each other and all they could do was look on as the sting of intimate details kept them distant from every person they encountered in their daily life. Every painful remembrance of their father brought on by the scent of Old Spice aftershave picked up on a passing stranger or the jolting sounds of a truck engine starting up just outside their window hurtled them back into the silence of grief. They both knew what it felt like. They both understood exactly how the other kept their grief tucked away in the back of their minds to visit and revisit when necessary. They both sensed the same kind of lingering sadness in each other that most people would not be able to access as anything beyond sadness. They both found their sadness to be everything beyond sadness, too. Sadness was not sad for them all the time. The silence that they indulged in with the oncoming waves of grief, while most often appearing as depressing, was their most treasured opportunity at something more complicated than happiness, possibly a contentedness with the newfound void of existence that they could fill and shape with whatever they wanted—but such silence they maintained as a preservation of that potential. They each took their time alone to build. Grief never retreated and often reached for their hands at the most unexpected moments, during which they could feel their minds shrink away from the boundaries of their skulls under the pressure of loss, but it was here they learned to build. Every time Grief appeared, they willingly reciprocated its clutch and wandered through the memories it had previously tainted of their father; Grief wanted only to show them regret and self-hatred. They showed Grief the origins of those materials. They walked each other back through the thick of the pain and found the beginnings of their relationship to death that their father had been slowly teaching them as they grew.

As the years passed and they spoke to one another more and more regarding the intricacies of their individual relationships with the death, they found something wonderful. The delicate and painful parts of their lives’ worst moment gave way to such a vast appreciation and understanding of both the pointlessness of life and the importance of levity amongst seriousness. For both Brooke and her sister, general human interaction became a test as to how other people were capable of dealing with even the slightest notion of what it meant to be sad, let alone grieving, and whether or not they could understand how not to be sad about grief. Brooke and her sister found after some time that the normal conversation they enjoyed with each other was not at all the type of conversation others would enjoy. It turned out that most people found the topic of their fathers death to be cause for pity and curt apologies. Brooke often explained that her father was her favorite topic of discussion, which did not necessarily mean people wanted to engage in that discussion—likely from disbelief that anyone could so comfortably talk about the most painful part of their life with ease, let alone levity. Brooke’s sister in another city found this struggle to be extremely relatable. Conversation, for her, often drifted to their father naturally. She believed much of her eclectic tastes and thoughts were owed to her father’s parenting, and of course if any of these were discussed, she couldn’t avoid gushing over the origins of her character.

**********

I had a dream the other night, and while I don’t remember all of it, I do still recall the exact feelings from it which makes it a lot easier to remember the images I was able to hold on to. Without any exposition, I entered the dream having understood already that my life had reached it’s lowest point, and nothing I loved was available to me anymore. I had no job and no place to live, and most importantly, no one to cling my life to while I struggled to find a spot for myself. In the dream, I had moved to Germany to live with two friends, who had actually made this move in reality. I was tired in the way someone feels when they’ve realized there is no world on their shoulders, but still hold a sneaking suspicion that letting that realization sink in will only bring the full force of that imagined weight back down on them. I walked into a house and looked around at the faces I saw, unfamiliar to me. I remember thinking in deflated statements: this is where you live now, this is who you live with, this is where you sleep, this is where you will be. Then I was alone, and as if the house opened up like sprawling clouds, I felt warm and saw everything around me glow in reflection of this sudden comfort and overwhelming security. Everything I had needed was now here with me in this new place that I didn’t know, and the emotion flooded my sleeping body. I had spent so much of my recent time feeling as if I would never get the things I wanted from myself. But now, Needing and Getting had fondly nodded at each other for my own benefit. I wanted everything in front of me and it was mine. This is where you’ve always wanted to be, this is who you’ve always loved, this is where you’ve always slept, this is where you will be, this is what you want, this is yours. I was afforded a look at what my subconscious wanted to remind me of: the long-term, romanticized wants that I so frequently forget are attainable. Love and admiration beyond my limited familial circle were not necessarily foreign to me, but largely unrealistic and doubtful in my life as something I was ever deserving of, let alone on the track to receive, but here I was to receive nothing but love and admiration, simply on the basis that this new place was ready to know me and take care of me. As I stepped outside to walk through my new glowing town, I awoke.

**********

I've been thinking about that time you visited me that never actually happened.

It was kind of rainy, but that might not actually be true, maybe just how I'd like to remember it. The cafe was empty, save for one or two couples quietly eating and drinking. I stared out the window and watched a woman stuff her yoga mat into the passenger side of her car and drive away, and as this happened, I imagined turning around from the smoothie I was making, looking out into the cafe to see you walk through the front door towards the register. You hadn't even been to the cafe before, but you walked in as confidently as you always did, with each left step accompanied by that weird dip to one side that you had always told us was from scoliosis. All you said was "Hi, sweetie." You surprised me--I didn't know you were in town, and you wanted to pick me up from work.  I told you I still had another hour of work, and then I put together a bowl of food and a juice for you, and you sat down with a newspaper to wait for me. It was so nice to be able to make food for you, show you parts of my life that you hadn't seen yet, and see how proud you were that I was working and supporting myself. The cafe was so warm and inviting in contrast to the weather outside, I remember that specifically. You took me out to get mint chocolate chip ice cream at the Baskin-Robbins next to the Italian restaurant we ate at once where our waitress had a black eye and made me try polenta for the first time. We had a completely normal evening. You took me home, told me you were driving back home that night, and said you would visit again soon so we could go see that movie with Kate Winslet I was telling you about.

I looked up again and watched the woman with the yoga mat drive away, and finished up the smoothie I was making for someone that wasn't you.

It still happens from time to time. Not as much as it used to, back when I was still living in that studio on Glisan and that haze of despondence shrouded my memory and there were a lot of things I don’t remember clearly enough to visualize, but still hold enough attachment to that thinking about them hurts the same as it did at first. I do remember taking myself to see that movie with Kate Winslet I was telling you about, and I do remember leaving the theater excited to call you and tell you about how much I liked the idea of minimal sets and actors. I also remember listening to your voicemail over and over again on the bus ride home, knowing that you wouldn’t pick up because you probably couldn’t, and knowing that my incessant phone calls were probably more irritating to you than I wanted to admit to myself. I remember the first and only time you came to visit me while I was at school and still living in the dorms. I remember bursting through the doors of my building, tripping onto the sidewalk and looking down the street to see you walking towards me with that weird dip in your step, holding a cardboard box. You had brought me things you thought I needed even though I hadn’t asked for anything: toilet paper, movies, all the letters my best friend had written me and sent to your address because I hadn’t given her my address at school yet, Capri Suns, and tangerines. I was so excited to show you my new life in Portland. It had only been my third week of class and I was too scared to skip anything for you so I had you wait in my dorm room while I spent an hour and a half listening to my professor talk about Ed Weston. I remember coming back from class and finding you napping on my bed. I remember you showing me how you figured out the thermostat in our room so my roommate and I could put away the giant down blankets we had been sleeping under for a month. I remember the two of us going to see a movie together, but for some reason I can’t remember what movie it was we saw, and I remember us eating dinner at the exact same Italian restaurant we always went to after movies because the chain had restaurants near all our favorite theaters in both Portland and Bend. And finally, I remember us walking around aimlessly trying to find the parking garage you left the car in, and I remember you driving me the few blocks back to my building and then telling me you had to drive back home—you wouldn’t be staying—which surprised and scared me all at once because I knew that this was the one good time I would have with you visiting me. I knew you wouldn’t be able to visit me after this. It may have been easier to say goodbye to you that day had I known what that day would end up being in my life, and of course, it ruined every day I had with you after that because every goodbye felt like the potential last goodbye. All optimism dropped off. The plans you had made with me to get back into running at the college track and maybe visit New York had wilted, and it was harder to look at you knowing that you had said those things to me hoping I wouldn’t give up so you wouldn’t give up.

But you had already done that.

I’ve started to feel a new kind of grief lately. Grief is difficult to put into plain words, which is probably why so many people have put their efforts into writing entire books about the subject, all filled with detailed, intimate statements on what it feels like. My favorite part of those statements are the brief occasions that they don’t describe a feeling at all—it’s a completely new existence. I don’t know what this new existence is. This new grief isn’t quite touching me. It’s gently grazing me, and every time it does, I’ve lost something else.

**********

You’re walking through the forest.

Soon you’ll go back to the house, a short 15 minute walk from this point. You will go into your room and start up your computer to see if the internet still isn’t working. You will get up and walk to the bathroom to wash your face. You really ought to wash your face more often, maybe it would help that greasy feeling you’ve had recently. You will wipe your face off with the towel you use after showering, and the faint smell of mildew will remind you that you haven’t done laundry in a couple weeks. You usually keep track of it by that one pair of underwear you’re forced to wear when you really have nothing else, but you’ve showered maybe every other day so your good pairs have lasted longer with multiple days of use. Maybe that greasy feeling is just what comes with the damp weather. You will walk back into the bedroom and stop, then turn around back into the bathroom to look at yourself in the mirror. You will look at yourself for a few minutes, but the amount of time spent is hardly something you’d notice. Your face looks different after you wash it. It feels different. You look more calm, and softer, too. But you always know that it’s the kind of different only you would ever notice. You won’t ever seem more attractive or beautiful or handsome to another person just because you washed your face. That’s fine.

You will turn around after the few minutes of looking are over, and as you walk back into the bedroom you will hear that light dinging sound from your computer that lets you know you have a new email. You will walk over to the computer and see an email from your older brother, which is weird to you because he doesn’t ever have a reason to email you, he can just call. The internet is working again, at least that’s apparent. It will be a short email: “Call me, it’s urgent.” You will start to get a little worried, because you know what probably has happened. You will be calm, though, because ultimately you know that it couldn’t have happened yet—you’ve been waiting for it to happen for months now. You will pick up your phone and start the call, but for some reason it isn’t going through. Maybe the phone isn’t working yet either. You will think about maybe going back out for another walk, because maybe there just isn’t any service in the house, maybe it’s better by the road or by the river, or maybe on top of that hill where you think you saw a bear. You will put your boots back on. You’re really glad you got those boots because you were always complaining about the rain ruining everything you owned. You still don’t even own a rain jacket, just a few thick coats that you try not to wear for too long when it starts to pour (ideally you won’t be outside for too long anyway if it’s raining). You will pull on your giant sweatshirt that’s starting to tear at the cuffs because before you wore it and loved it, it was well loved by someone else, and that’s why you won’t ever get rid of it. Years from now, when you’re living with a roommate in the southeast part of town where you swear you’d never live, you will have two cats and you will come home one night to find your roommate throwing the sweatshirt into the trash because his cat peed all over it and he didn’t think it was worth saving, and you will say nothing about what that sweatshirt was or who it belonged to. You will tell him that’s fine, and then sit in your room for a while without crying.

After you put on the sweatshirt and tie up the boots, you will head back outside. First you walk down the gravel path towards the main road. It will be raining a little, but you usually don’t mind this kind of rain. You will see the main road ahead after a few minutes, but you won’t want to stop walking so you turn right and head towards the river past that smaller house that you’ve always been a little scared of because no one ever seems to be home during the day but every light is on at night. Why is it that you’ve never seen the person that stays there? You will decide to make use of the boots and trek through the brush, and while you do this, you remember to snap twigs and step on a few flowers so if you get lost you can find your way back, or at the very least, a rescue team will be able to see which way you went. You always think about this when walking through the forest, and sometimes you think about it when walking through the city. Maybe that’s why you’ve always felt compelled to touch every plant you pass; you’ve always secretly thought you were leaving a mark to help save yourself later. The river will be right ahead of you. You don't think you’ve been to this part of the river before, maybe you walked farther than usual. Maybe it’s a different offshoot of the river. Maybe you are lost. Maybe not. There will be a large section of a fallen tree leaning against the bank, partially sliding into the river. It will be horizontal enough that you will think it a good idea to climb onto and be closer to the rapids. It will be too slippery, though, and once you get onto the trunk you have to sit down on it to keep from falling off into the mud or the river and the butt of your pants will be soaked. You will regain your balance and assess the safest way to dismount, but that will prove to be useless and the legs of your pants will also be soaked. The water is shallow near the bank where the tree slips into the river, and in the past you’ve been careless enough to just step into the water, boots and all, but this time you will be more careful. A large flat island of a rock will sit on the other side of the fallen tree in the water, and you will clamber back up the bank and down to the other side to sit on the rock. It will be cold, but it will be dry. You will sit for a few seconds and then remember that you came out here to find service for your phone, but you forgot to bring your phone with you. It won’t matter. You know what happened. You won’t think about it directly because if you think the exact thought then it might make it come true, and you have been scared of doing just that for months. So you will sit on the rock, looking into the rolling movement of the water below you. You will think about all the places this water has been, and all the people who might have bathed in it or drunk it, or splashed in it with their families, or carried it back to their homes, or died in it. You will think about all the places this water will go after it passes by you, through your hand, and all the people you will surreptitiously touch with this water even after you’ve gone back to the house, back into bed, back to the city, back to your tiny apartment on the second floor, back to school, back to work, back to friends and the small family you have, but never back home.

You are not in the forest. You are in your bed, waking up, and your phone is ringing. It’s your brother calling and you know why. It happened. Your father died.

**********

I had another dream about you.

No.

It was about me. I had a dream about not having any parents. In the back of my mind I’ve always been jealous of other people when they talk about both of their parents—not just because they still have their father, but because they have a mother they call their mother.

In this particular dream, Mom was already dead. She had been dead for years, and you were suddenly on your way out, too. But I don’t remember seeing you in my dream. I don’t remember seeing you and talking with you and telling you I love you over and over again because it might be the last time I say I love you. The dream took place immediately after you had died, even though I had this distinct feeling of having just seen you. You were right there.

Now you’re not.

I was with a boyfriend and I think his family. It feels strange to write about a present relationship in this dream because whatever happens with that relationship will change the entire effect of reading this to myself later. Will I adjust that phrase to reflect the changes in our relationship? I was with my fiancé. I was with my ex-boyfriend. I was with my husband. I was with my friend but at the time we were dating.

You will never meet any of my boyfriends. Your life ended years before I even met him, and before I met anyone else that may be important to me the way you were. You will never know who this person is and was to me, but in this dream, he took care of me after your death. He was close to you in my mind at the time, and he was present for me and your death in my mind. The most disgusting part of his inclusion in this dream, to me, is how little he will probably end up meaning to me. That doesn’t matter.

I was with his family. We walked around outside, I think we were at a park, or a farmer’s market, or a mountain resort, or Disneyland. They took me here because they wanted to surround me with people and distract me. All I thought about while we walked was it happened yesterday, it happened two days ago, he died two days ago. I had been living with one dead parent for so long that it didn’t seem believable that you would go, too. She had died, and that was all. It didn’t cause any great pain or sense of loss in my life, because in this dream I had always lived without the luxury of a mother. Now there was even less than that. I had no father. I had no one. I was surrounded by people who were all family. I could feel the weight of my loss so vividly. It wasn’t that their presentation as a family upset me so much as their complete disregard for each other. They didn’t care why they were there together, they didn’t care that they were together, they didn’t care that I was suffering because of what I didn’t have anymore that they so clearly had in abundance. They had it, and they had so much of it.

I walked away from them. I remember walking up a sloped pathway towards a structure that could have been restrooms or a cafeteria and as I approached this building, someone called out to me and touched my back. It was a man. A particular man. I don’t know how else to establish his significance to me and to this dream other than this: in reality, I didn’t know him at all, but we were seeing each other for a short week or two before he decided he didn’t want to get to know me anymore. It was the first time I’ve ever felt so embarrassed for being so interested in a person. He made me embarrassed for my age, and for the way I talked, and for being so eager, and for treating other people with such disregard before this, but he was wonderful. The more time I spend thinking about him, the more I consider the standard he set for the type of person I aspire to be and be with. He doesn’t get a name here, because eventually I would spend my time thinking not about him, but how little he thought about me. And then I would think about all the ways in which he was wonderful, and slowly each one of those things would peel away in my mind and reveal the self-involved, self-flattered direction behind each interesting question and condescending compliment. He wasn’t better than me. I stopped feeling embarrassed.

He asked me how I was doing and I told him about my dad. In a swift and unreal motion, he lead me to a picnic table where we could sit down and he could properly console me. He sat across from me and told me how sorry he was. He used that tone of voice that people have used with me before when I talk about my dad—it’s the kind of tone that makes you hate a person for trying to comfort you because it isn’t genuine concern and you can sense exactly how much they are trying to sound concerned. But in this instance, I looked on at him blankly and thanked him, because in that moment, regardless of what he was trying at, he was trying and he was listening to me. I felt confident staring back at him and accepting his consolation. We sat and we talked. I don’t know what we talked about, but soon my boyfriend walked up to the table and sat down next to me, and without looking away from the man across from me, I introduced them, and woke up.

**********

Brooke is in another city—a new city. Brooke’s sister is not in this city. Fortunately, moving her life to a new city is not the same as the death of a loved one; it does get easier. Unfortunately, the space between sisters remained exactly the same in this move, and now both sisters are alone and sad and scared, and can more openly establish that “I think I’m depressed,” and “Oh, I think I might be too,” during phone conversations after work or after class. Loneliness is not easy to indulge in this new environment, not in the same way one might indulge their loneliness in the middle of a bustling metropolis. Here, Brooke has no one that she knows and no one that she loves, but she has been given new people. She has her new grad school classmates, and her new roommates, and a Corgi that came with one of her new roommates. She has no more boyfriend, no more best friend, and still no sister, but even in the sunken feeling of loss, she has been given too much “new” to ruminate on that loss the same way she has in the past. When one has no choice but to be alone, an entirely new sadness is piled on top of the others, because in grief, sadness and separation should be properly indulged in—one must give themselves the time to process this new separation. But when one has no choice but to remain in that separation from anything that could help them return from grief, it becomes all too easy to accept that sadness as part of everything. Everything is sadness.

Or maybe that is her sister speaking. Maybe she’s coming out of the sadness, but her sister hasn’t found the exit yet, and she can’t help but step back in to get her out of the Everything.

After her father’s death, and just as she was settling into the studio on Glisan that her sister had already occupied for a few months, Brooke cried almost every day. It didn’t matter the reason she started crying, because once it had overwhelmed her, she could remember that the particular sadness that lingered (from grief, loss, whatever) would be reason enough to keep crying, and from there it consistently became a blubbering mess of no-friends, job-stress, what-to-do-with-my-degree, I-want-to-call-dad, we-are-alone crying.

[theteej]

6. Four Year Flight

On January 16, 2013, my plane touched down in Chicago, ending another winter visit home to California. As I picked up my bag in baggage claim, my heart thudded in my chest. I was about to be picked up by Ben Bascom, and I was anxious, excited, overwhelmed.  Ben had decided to make the nearly 300 mile (482 km) round trip between Champaign-Urbana and Chicago to pick me up, have dinner in the city, and then ride down together.  It was our first date.

I’d met Ben at a grad student party a little over a month before, just after Thanksgiving 2012. I’d spent ten months in South Africa and had just returned from a month in the UK, doing research for the dissertation. I’d newly started the anxiety-ridden adventure of actually writing a book-length project; the day I met him I had just started work on my second chapter and desperately welcomed the distraction.  We’d hit it off relatively quickly; he was simultaneously quiet and energetic, somewhat shy but also deeply interested in people and ideas.  More than that, he was kind, and he made me want to know more about what was happening behind that smile of his.  We chatted over the next few weeks, and stayed in touch daily while we were both home for the December holidays.  When he offered to pick me up and arrange a date, I eagerly—if anxiously—said yes.  Neither of us had really dated someone of the same sex before; we were both new to a lot.

I’d known that I was queer for a long time, but my self-identification was a long and complex process.  By my mid-teens I’d come to realize that I was attracted physically to both men and women, and as an evangelical kid this terrified me.  I decided I shouldn’t date anyone at the moment, but I found myself only romantically interested in women.  For years I found myself physically attracted to men and women, but emotionally drawn only to women.  I wasn’t sure how one should ‘identify’ in such a fashion, and I decided to just go with straight(ish) for the time being.  Or at least not queer.  My adventures in dating post-college weren’t extraordinarily great, either.  I’d had a long on-again, off-again with a college friend, but the distance (she was in San Francisco, I in San Diego), and my own myriad insecurities made sure that never really became something solid or reliable.  I dated a law student while a high school teacher, but that was marred by our busy schedules, intensive travel, and too much pressure.  After the spectacular implosion of that relationship just before I started graduate school in 2008, I vowed to remain single for as long as possible. Relationships were scary and unknowable and caused nothing but pain.  I buried myself in work, in research, and in graduate school in Illinois, finding close friendships and intensive research to be preferable to any more painful entanglements.

Yet, by 2012, after nearly a year abroad in South Africa and the UK, I’d returned with new eyes.  I was openly acknowledging my queerness, as it were, and had finally decided to live openly in multiple senses: I was not only open about not being straight, but I was open to the idea of meeting and loving someone of the same gender as me.  Ben was one of the first people I met in this new time in my life, and I found myself surprised by how hard I fell for him.  He was kind.  He was thoughtful. He was witty—brilliantly and caustically and wonderfully so, a side of him that I felt not nearly enough people who knew him saw.  When his car pulled up in front of the airport in Chicago, I beamed with excitement and hope and a good measure of fear.  

We both had a lot to learn: about ourselves, about relationships, about how to let someone into your life when you weren’t used to such a thing.  Ben was soft-spoken and secretive in all the ways that I was profoundly loud and up-front.  We clashed, we misunderstood each other, we fundamentally misread each other’s intentions. But we also cared, we built something, we learned to be open with people in a way we hadn’t been before.  For eighteen months I got to know a beautiful, complex, wonderful human in the cornfields of central Illinois, and learned more about who I was and the kind of person that I wanted to be.

Without a doubt, Ben and I are very different people, despite our shared penchants for irony, spectacles, and the folly of pursuing a doctorate in the humanities.  One of the many incredible things that Benjamin taught me was about the fundamental need for kindness and good faith.  I tend to take a relatively hard line with actions and interpretations.  If things feel wrong or unjust or dishonest, they shouldn’t be accommodated.  They should be called out.  They should be named.  This is how transformation happens.  And truly, it’s worked for me in a lot of ways.  It can be abrupt and blunt, but it is also really powerful. For someone who grew up as a person of color and tasted firsthand feelings of powerlessness and despair in the face of structural fuckery, this sort of outlook felt safe and right.  Ben didn’t live like that.  Ben loved people in a unique and individual way; he sought to know them, to care for them, and to know who they were inside.  In the midst of my angry dismissals of people, he’d say, “but you have to remember why they’re doing this” or “yes, but they’re also acting this way because of this.”  And I’d angrily have to concede the point.  This didn’t mean that someone’s actions were any less wrong, but did mean that I was forced to acknowledge a shared humanity with someone that I was often not willing to do.  Ben taught me in a lot of ways to see good in people, and to care for them. He never blunted my intuition or told me to stop caring about justice, but he also asked e to be softer, to be kinder, to love people in a far more holistic way.  It’s one of the things I remain the most grateful for in knowing him, that he cared for people in a meaningful, individual way, and really tried to know them.  Every now and then I find myself echoing his questions about people’s motivations or concerns when I’ve jumped to a fully self-righteous conclusion, and I know that I was lucky to have such a kind teacher.

A year and a half into our relationship, I moved to Virginia to take my current job.  I was terrified that this would cause us to breakup.  Ben travelled with me for the move and stayed the first week and a half in my transition to the heart of Confederatelandia. He reassured a scared new professor that this was possible.  He loved me, and I loved him.  We encountered so many strange and unfamiliar parts of life in the Shenandoah together in those first few days, and when he left on a plane back to Illinois, my eyes filled with tears as someone I loved flew away.  Before the flight, Ben looked me in the eyes and smiled, “Don’t worry,” he said. “This is an adventure. Think of how we’ll get to know each other in new ways over this distance—it’s a new journey!”

“I’m scared,” I admitted. “I’m scared that this will all end.”

“I don’t think that’ll happen.  But we’re in this weird, wonderful thing together,” he answered.

And it was a great first year together over distance, spending time learning about each other in new ways, communicating over great distances, and catching each other up on different parts of our lives in ways we hadn’t expected.  That second year, however, was far harder.  Work on Ben’s dissertation was stressful; being a new tenure-track professor was as well.  We had less time.  We heard each other less. We misunderstood each other more. Our times felt heavy with a new tension, or importance—we had to make things count, or we’d miss our few times together. We’d fight and then be mad that we’d wasted precious time. It was hard. It wasn’t anywhere near the adventure of the previous year.  Ben briefly moved out to Virginia and then came back to Illinois to finish the dissertation.  We kept going on.  We were each other’s people.  I didn’t know how I could really be in Virginia without Ben’s reassurance, or Ben’s kindness, or Ben’s love.  I couldn’t imagine a different reality without him here.  But things were changing.  We were changing.

On June 1, 2016, we talked on the phone, a regular nightly tradition.  But he sounded different. It didn’t take long to get to the heart of it. He didn’t want to try any more. And it took time, but in the middle of the conversation I had to realize that one person’s interest could not sustain a relationship.  That we weren’t going to be able to continue as us.  It was hard to say goodbye.  Fuck, it was devastating.  

The first few days after were by far the hardest.  I’d learned how to be a grown-up academic in some ways because of the constant love and support of a brilliant and beautiful person.  I didn’t know how to be T.J. without that person every day.  I also wanted to immediately, intuitively retreat to who I’d been in the years before knowing Ben; someone that sealed his emotional core, someone that didn’t think he could date people, someone who thought emotional entanglements were too much.  But if there’s anything I’ve learned in the last seven months, it’s that you can live through a hell of a lot of change in your life.  You can learn to be different and to see people differently. Relationships that end aren’t failures; rather, they’re the end of a formative time in your lives and they can be the beginning of something new.  I don’t’ have to jettison all of the change and all of the learning because of a relationship’s end.  Instead, I have to continue to learn how to love people, to see their contexts, to not only privilege my intuition or reading of a situation and to see the humanity in others.  I’m a far, far way from being together or whole or not broken by this experience, by this end.  But I’ve learned so much from it, and I’m really fucking grateful to have been loved by someone and able to love them back.  And so, four years later, I think back on that first airport date with sadness and gratitude.  And I continue to be open to the idea of new growth, and new learning, and remembering that I have and will survive so many changes.  I’m going to keep these memories tinged with joy, heartache, and hope.

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This is the eleventh of sixteen short essays about things that have changed for me this year. Stay tuned for the (finally) remaining few as time goes on. #Teej16

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[dorcasrempel]

From delayed deceleration to Zooming

On Nov. 21, 2019, the sun had set just a couple of hours before on an unseasonably warm day, and Jacqueline Thomas PhD ’20 found herself sitting on the edge of her seat in a typical meeting room in the William J. Hughes Technical Center, part of the Federal Aviation Administration, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Thomas, a graduate student in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) at MIT, focused intently in front of a small monitor, her eyes fixed on the black screen illuminated by a white outline of the U.S. East Coast and the small, neon green dot that showed the Boeing 777 commercial airplane, which had flown nearly nine hours from Frankfurt, Germany, and was just about to land at Atlantic City International Airport. The last three minutes of this flight were crucial, and it was exactly the moment Thomas had been waiting for.

Accompanied by her advisor, R. John Hansman, professor of aeronautics and director of the MIT International Center for Air Transportation, Thomas felt her heart pounding as she monitored the data the plane generated as it landed in real time, which she checked simultaneously against her predicted outcomes based on her computational model. These final moments of this particular aircraft’s journey would determine if the model that formed a significant portion of her graduate thesis worked in the real world. And it did.

“We waited all day for these final three minutes, and as we watched the plane land through the monitor, my advisor John kept asking if the plane was doing what I expected it to, and it was! Even though I predicted it, it was still surprising,” says Thomas. “I knew the science was sound, I knew the math was sound, but even when everything is going as planned and you are actually seeing it happening with your own eyes, it’s still surreal.”

Just a few short months earlier, Thomas proposed her idea for a “delayed deceleration approach” to Boeing under their ecoDemonstrator (ecoD) program. Essentially, the Boeing ecoD acts as a “bench-to-bedside” innovation accelerator, inviting researchers to pitch novel concepts to improve aviation safety and efficiency that solve real-world challenges for aviation and the environment, where they are tested in real aircraft to demonstrate feasibility. Thomas’ proposal outlined a new flight procedure for pilots to follow while landing that improves aircraft performance around two major challenges the airline is currently facing: carbon emissions and noise pollution.

According to a report released in October 2019 by the Environmental Protection Agency, air travel currently accounts for nearly 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and it is increasing at a much faster rate than initially anticipated. In addition to the negative environmental impact, the increase in the number of commercial flights has increased the number of noise complaints from citizens who live along flight trajectories beyond the jurisdiction of noise regulations, which are typically localized to the areas immediately surrounding airports. The pressure is on for airline companies to work quickly to address these issues, and Thomas proposed a concept that decreased the noise and emissions of existing aircraft without having to modify the aircraft itself, which could be a cost-effective way for airlines to mitigate these issues.

“As soon as a plane is built, it’s hard to change its function. It will generate noise no matter what state it’s in,” says Thomas. “I chose to approach the problem like an integrated system — if you can change the input, you can change the output. In other words, if you can’t change the aircraft itself (the function), you can change how it’s flown (the inputs).”

Using this idea, Thomas built a computational framework to analyze aircraft noise and measure the impact of making changes to the operational flight procedure. For her analysis, the inputs included how all of the aircraft components move and interact to generate noise, as well as flight performance data, which accounts for how the aircraft generates noise at different points as it moves through its environment, such as when it accelerates or slows down. The output from this framework was a full-scope overflight noise model, which was then analyzed against community data to paint a clear picture of how making tweaks to the inputs would impact the noise pollution in surrounding communities.

“What resulted from this framework was my concept for the delayed deceleration approach, a new flight procedure where the aircraft remains cleanly configured for as long as possible during approach, meaning the flaps, slats, and landing gear remain upright for as long as possible,” says Thomas. “When the aircraft has a clean configuration, it is more aerodynamic, creating less drag and allowing it to maintain engines at a lower power setting for longer duration in the flight. As a result, the plane burns less fuel, decreasing carbon emissions, and generates less noise for the community on the ground.”

Under the ecoD program, Thomas handed her procedure over to Boeing engineers in Seattle, Washington, who communicated it to the crew throughout the flight via a chat feed that Thomas and Hansman could see on the monitor, along with the plane’s location. Immediately following the landing, the all-women flight crew joined Thomas, Hansman, and the group of Boeing engineers and administrators from the ecoD program for a debrief.

“The pilots reported they felt very comfortable with the procedure, and didn’t experience any flyability issues. When the models say that it works and has all of these benefits, and the pilots say ‘yes, we can fly this,’ and a commercial plane actually flies the procedure and matches the predictions from the models, then it really shows that we can do this, and we should because it’s a win-win for everyone,” says Thomas. “My goal for the future is to make this a standard flight procedure, which means I need to keep working on refining this process so we can scale it up in a way that makes sense to implement in real airlines operating today.”

After nearly six years and countless hours spent at the computer in the lab, this was an extraordinary opportunity for a graduate student; it can take years to put together a flight test, and thanks to the Boeing ecoD program, this test came together in a matter of a few months. It was the perfect way to begin winding down her final year at MIT.

With the excitement of the ecoDemonstrator behind her, Thomas set her sights on preparing for one of the biggest milestones in a graduate student’s career: the thesis defense. Typically, this rite of passage is a celebratory one that comes after months of coordinating busy thesis committee schedules and practicing presentations backward and forward. Thomas was also in the process of job hunting, interviewing for academic positions in between putting the finishing touches on her thesis presentation. And then the coronavirus hit. As the pandemic and MIT’s response to it rapidly unfolded, campus closures, travel restrictions, and stay-at-home orders snapped the public health crisis into focus. Everything became a scramble as Thomas watched months of planning go out the window, and she knew she would have to improvise quickly.

“I had to move my defense online, and my internet at home is really sketchy, so I was terrified,” says Thomas. “It was weird not worrying about the typical things you would normally worry about before a thesis defense, like wondering if my presentation was good enough. I was more nervous about needing to defend my thesis by holding my phone up to my face.”

Thomas submitted a formal request to MIT to use one of the few classrooms that remained open on campus by appointment only to defend her thesis. Instead of defending her thesis to a room full of people, she was in an empty room on a Zoom call, where she could only see five attendees at any given time. When she finished her presentation and answered all of the questions from her thesis committee, she was asked to log off of the Zoom call, where she sat in silence in the cavernous room, alone. Five minutes later, she received a congratulatory phone call, and just like that, she was a doctor.

“It was bizarre. Normally you are with other people to talk to and celebrate with, but I was just in a room by myself, and there was no one else at MIT,” says Thomas. “One of the cool things about holding my defense virtually was that my friend in Japan logged in to watch, even though it was 2 a.m. his time. But my fiancé, who is also studying aerospace as a grad student at Georgia Tech, wanted to come be with me for my defense, but we decided together that with the safety measures asking visitors from out-of-state to self-quarantine, it just wasn’t possible.”

Thomas, like many graduate students, lived in an off-campus apartment with a roommate, a postdoc at a neighboring university, who had only recently moved in. Since graduate students and postdocs spend so much time on campus, this is a typical living arrangement. Many graduate students attend school far from home, so the stay-at-home order can be particularly isolating, especially when you are living with a near-perfect stranger without work to focus on.

Since turning in her thesis, Thomas kept busy with early-morning runs around the Charles River, refreshing her Japanese and Spanish-speaking vocabulary, catching up on TV shows she’d fallen behind on while dealing with the demands of graduate school, and trying to maintain glimmers of normalcy, such as attending regular church services (albeit virtually). While exciting career opportunities are on the horizon, many other personal plans, like her wedding date, are at a standstill as we remain in the grip of uncertainty at the mercy of a global pandemic.

“It feels like I’m in a limbo state, because my work is pretty much done and I’m just waiting for the next chapter to start, which feels like it’s taking longer than usual because so much of it is spent alone,” says Thomas.

For Thomas, one of the more difficult aspects she is grappling with is the abrupt ending of her time at MIT. As a first-generation college student, Thomas’ family had set aside money for the major expense of traveling to experience MIT Commencement with her, and it was tough to watch her families’ travel plans, and the hard-earned money put toward them, evaporate.

“Grad school is hard, but looking back, you realize how much you grew throughout the experience, and I wanted to tip my hat to MIT when I left,” says Thomas. “This is my sixth year here, and it’s a long time to be involved at a place and then suddenly, it leaves you within three days. I think the hardest thing for me has been this lack of closure. It’s like a severed connection.”

Thomas is hopeful for the future. She will become a member of the faculty at her alma mater, the University of California at Irvine, where she will teach and continue her work on aircraft noise mitigation and pursue exciting new directions studying electric aircraft. She also hopes for future events that could bring the Class of 2020 back on campus to say a proper goodbye — once it is safe to do so.

From delayed deceleration to Zooming syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

[stealmyjoygivemeapen-blog]

Reflecting and Envisioning

TIME TO REFLECT

          My class for Innovative Public Relations Tools and Resources has been exactly what I expected it to be. During my initial Mastery class in April, I expected that I would learn how to use social media to my advantage as it relates to promoting my brand, and to create something that will make my job easier. 

           Looking back on the last 4 weeks I honestly believe that I have learned a great deal in this class.  The main thing that I wanted to learn from this course is exactly what are the newest and latest tools in the public relations world. 

          It’s funny, because this seemed to be the longest class ever, yet it feels like the information I took from it is quite helpful. This month, as the world knows, we got hit by Hurricane Irma. My home was hit pretty hard with significant damage and a week of no power. All of our refrigerated goods spoiled, our deep freezer defrosted and no A/C. Where I thought I was doing great in week one, I got a nightmare and almost a heart attack when I saw my grades had become zeros due to no power and no access to my classes and assignments. After a couple of days of freaking out our teacher calmed us by letting us know classes and assignments would be extended, and there I felt the most relief I had in a couple weeks. 

           I know this post isn’t supposed to focus entirely on Irma, but she came through with a vengeance and it was something that affected so many of us. Within my home we had flooding, and missing pieces to our roof. The windows shook so bad that night I found myself jumping back just from the pressure... and let’s not say pressure isn’t anything. The popping of my ears from the pressure moving thought the house was horrible. Not only did we have no power in the 95 degree heat but then we were out of water, and food, leaving my babies very cranky, hungry, tired, hot, and unbathed all in the same moment. Trees had fallen and my car was ruined, no longer starting and no longer able to drive my kids to school or myself to work. I even lost my job because I had no way to get there. I think we got a new meaning of thankful when power returned, and life somewhat returned to normal. 

           Back to the course... During this course I was introduced to the app Pinterest. I previously knew of Pinterest but I never had the chance to use it. Pinterest has given me the chance to keep a virtual bookmark on things that interest me personally and professionally. 

          I believe that the biggest thing that I have learned in this course is that the public relations world is just waiting for innovative minds and concepts to take the genre to the next level. When researching PR apps this week (it was supposed to be last week, but we all know where I was, and it was nowhere able to access the internet), I noticed that there are some really good apps on the market. I came across Tape-A-Talk. I found that Tape-a-Talk is a recorder for easy audio and voice recording. You can pause it, and seek rewind or forward in record mode, like with a dictation machine. There is a button on the screen that you can scroll left or right through the recording to find the spot that you want to listen to closer. Tape-a-Talk picks up audio in high quality, even when the display is off. There is no time limit to how long you can record. You can even record from inside of your widgets without staying directly into the app.

         While using the application I found there was an option to sort each recording. I was able to choose between file size, date, newest, and oldest.

         While using the app there are customization options within the application. You can even send and save your recordings to an external SD card as so it’s not on your phone or it’s easily accessible on a computer or any play back device.

         In this application you are able to cut the recordings, delete recordings and I was even able to send a recording through messages and email. It comes in handy, especially for news or litigation purposes. Whenever there is a good story, all you have to do is start the recording and it will capture the noise in your surroundings.

         While this is a great app, I’d like an application that can record as well as this app while also having the option to record video and take pictures with the sound embedded in them. I’d like to be able to import my recording into Word and get an automatic script of what was said and by whom. The “by whom” part would be able to recognize the owners voice and know who “other” would be. Another function I’d like in my app would be to be able to single out each voice and name their voice in the recording so when the script is typed it would automatically have each persons’ or characters’ name already printed. This would be the ultimate app, I believe. Now is the time for someone to create something that has a little bit of everything in the PR world; such as the way that Facebook did in 2004. 

          I believe that this course will help me finish out the second half of grad school strongly. It has re-energized me so much and most of all, it’s given me the opportunity to understand the real life scenarios that I am going to face in the PR world.

           I look forward to seeing what is next in my Mastery Journey.

[bostonbridget]

Dating Chronicles: The Cheap Bastard

We met on Tinder, of course. I was newly back to Tinder after an extended hiatus during which I relied on Bumble, Hinge, and the old-fashioned way to meet people/snag dates/get frustrated with life. But one of my best friends was using Tinder for the first time, and hearing her talk about the excitement of swiping for the first time, combined with a slow Friday night and a bottle of wine, made me itch to jump back into the cesspool.

Michael seemed great at first. A couple years older than me, he was new to Boston and a grad student at a highly acclaimed music school so we talked about artsy shit and fun stuff to do in the city. Our messages were a little more intellectually stimulating than my usual Tinder exchanges, and to top it off, he was from Australia so he had the sexy accent factor. When he asked if I wanted to meet up the next week I enthusiastically accepted.

“Sounds great, what were you thinking?” “Give me a few days, and I’ll plan something for us.”

I liked the sound of that. A man with a plan automatically gets extra attractiveness points. Then he followed up with a curveball:

“How about you come over to mine and we’ll make sushi together? It’ll be a fun way to get to know each other.”

…um.

I responded “Hey that sounds really fun, but to be honest I would feel more comfortable meeting in a public place for the first time.” He seemed to get it, and suggested we go ice skating and get hot chocolate instead. I agreed, he asked if I wanted to get a drink somewhere near the ice rink beforehand, I suggested one of my favorite spots, we had a date set.

Despite suggesting we meet for a drink prior to skating, he didn’t end up ordering a drink. When I finished my glass of Cab Sav, he not only made no movement toward his own wallet to pay for mine, but didn’t bat an eye when I eventually got the hint and paid for my drink. This wouldn’t have bothered me in the slightest if he’d established that he wanted to go Dutch on the drink situation, but I was operating under the impression that he was paying since he was calling all the shots. I got the feeling that if I hadn’t paid we both would have sat staring at the bartender all night. The first date was off on a weird foot already.

I have a season pass to the skating rink, so he only had to pay for himself. That’s when I learned he had never skated before in his life—he proposed that date since he knew I love skating. Ok, that’s really cute, I admitted, but that also meant the whole date was me giving him a skating lesson. After about a half hour of riding the struggle bus straight into the ice, I suggested we follow up on his hot chocolate idea. He agreed, but as we made our way off the ice he asked if I had my wallet on me. Taken aback, I stammered that I had left it in my skate bag. I went to fetch it. When I got back to the concession stand, a long line had formed and so he bought my hot chocolate since he was standing right there and it would save time, plus as he put it, “It’s the least I can do since you’re teaching me how to skate.” The drink cost $1.50. The fact that he’d been so reluctant to shell out for something he’d proposed in the first place rubbed me the wrong way but I pushed it out of the way so I could enjoy the rest of the date.

On our walk back to the subway, we passed the movie theatre and he mentioned he’d been hoping to see some films. We spent a few minutes discussing the current releases, then I gave him a hug goodbye at my subway stop and told him we should definitely meet again next week. First date down, overall my spirits were high.

A few days later we started texting to plan Date 2. He wanted to skate again but I put the kibosh on that because I enjoy skating, not teaching a six foot conglomeration of arms and legs how not to fall on me. I suggested a movie instead—the weather was looking spotty, and we had talked about movies just recently. “I’m not taken by the selection at the moment.”

…um. We literally just discussed this a few days ago. I was confused. I knew he was a student, so maybe he was trying to save money? Working off that theory, I suggested the Museum of Fine Arts since admission is free on Wednesday nights.

The date was going well enough besides a complete absence of physical chemistry on my part, until we started swapping roommate horror stories. Mine include a violent alcoholic and a kleptomaniac—separate people, and stories for another day—but his roommate’s capital sin was…wait for it…leaving the heat on in the apartment when he goes out so that the temps stay at 72 degrees. Apparently, this is a wasteful and expensive practice. I held my tongue rather than blurt out that I can’t live in a house that’s colder than 72, but mentally I chalked this up as a potential issue.

At the end of this date, we discussed going out again, and he said his student budget is tight but he was dying to try some restaurants in the city since he hasn’t done much culinary exploration in the 3 months he’s been here (To be more specific, he got fast food twice and that was the extent of it. For a man who describes himself as a foodie, I found this strange). I enthusiastically described a few of my favorite places for potential future dates and then we parted ways.

On the way home I convinced myself that since he was apparently a broke student we wouldn’t go out again because he seemed completely uninterested in paying for anything, particularly me. This was starting to really bother me. I should point out I’m not a materialistic person, but Boston is an expensive-ass city and there are really only so many things you can do for free on a date before you’re stuck with Netflix & chill. Additionally, I love going out for dinner and drinks. I do it all the time with my friends, and it’s a part of my life I’m not willing to give up with for the sake of dating someone without a convenient 9-5 like yours truly.

That night, my roommate and I decided together that I’d stop seeing him, and literally a minute later he texts me “Want to get dinner this weekend?” I was taken aback. Maybe he’d finally seen the light as to my likes/dislikes, and was also interested enough to finally sacrifice a little to spend more time with me. I replied “Sounds great, where were you thinking?” He goes, “I’m not very familiar with places in the city—where do you want to go?” At this point, I’ve planned all our dates, and my patience was a hair away from cracking entirely. Just get on Yelp like a normal person and figure this shit out! I politely encouraged him to do some research and choose. He comes back with “How about I make you dinner?”

Fuuuuuuuuuck we’re doing this again? Nope nope nope. 

“I assumed you meant a restaurant since you mentioned it last night,” I reply. “I was thinking about it, and you’ve shared some important things about you with me, and I’m not sure that I can do the same by taking you to a restaurant I don’t know in a new city. I figure sharing some food from back home would be a nice way to do that though.”

I’ve shared important things? I assume he’s referring to my love for skating and art, but those aren’t dark secrets I save for super special people. Now I’m genuinely uncomfortable with the idea of spending more time with this kid, but I already said yes. Fuck. Fortunately I managed to move it up from dinner to lunch, so less pressure. I also fabricated an unmissable commitment at 2 with a friend in order to keep a time limit on this date.

This third date confirmed my suspicion that he was a cheap bastard because, at his house, he talked about how much every one of his possessions cost, and how much money he saved on his purchases. It was weird. He also gave me an exhaustive history of every scholarship he’d ever applied for and their exact worth. You know, typical cutesy date talk.

The incredible exotic “food from back home” (Australia) turned out to be pasta with marinara sauce. Did the poor guy not know that Americans eat Italian food?? I mean, it was pretty good, but I’ve definitely made equally good pasta myself and I don’t have a drop of Italian blood in me. I also live in a city with a killer Italian neighborhood and the best damn Italian you’ll have west of the Atlantic. Michael’s fate was sealed. I completely stopped giving a fuck about making a good impression and dove straight into the worst date conversations: politics, religion, and stuff that pisses me off. My attempts to turn the guy off failed miserably though because, incredibly, he found my opinions very interesting and engaging. *hair flip* Realizing this, I promptly developed a bad case of stank face, told him I had to run, and peaced the eff out of there, barely giving him a hug goodbye. I texted him later thanking him for dinner, and he tried to talk about politics and religion more but I did not engage. He must have gotten the hint because I never heard from him again.

This story was long AF, but the life lesson is that cheap bastards exist, they are the worst, and don’t let any of their charms distract you from that fatal flaw.