tribibble · 2 years ago
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is anyone else gonna talk about tim's projectile vomit finishing move or do i have to be the one to bring it up
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spaceorphan18 · 4 years ago
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99 Perspectives on a Single Love Story #15
A/N: The Story of Kurt and Blaine told through the eyes of everyone else but them. Each chapter is a different perspective in the ongoing tale of their love story.
I started something like this a while back - and now I’m taking the idea and really running with it. Each chapter is a ficlet of a different character at a different point in Kurt and Blaine’s life - documenting their love story. This starts in Audition, and each chapter will be paired with a different episode until reaching Dreams Come True.
[Ao3]
This chapter's style is a little different, cause I found it funny. I couldn't get a screencap of it - but if you stop Sexy at 13 minutes, 41 seconds, you'll see all eleven ladies in a row.
***
The Ladies of Crawford Country Day (Sexy) 
What the Ladies of Crawford Country Day are really thinking during the Dalton Academy Warblers’ performance of Animal:
Jessica: There are so many hot boys from Dalton Academy. I wonder how easy it would be to hook up with all of them?
Ashleigh: Jess is totally gonna hook up with, like, half of these guys. I wonder if she can throw me a bone. The round-face guy is super cute - I could totally hook up with him. If he’s not, like, gay or something. Oh, fuck, he’s probably gay.
Emily: I wonder how many of them are gay? I wonder how many of them have hooked up with each other? Oh my god, this is such a great inspiration for my next Sherlock/Watson High School AU I’m writing. My readers online are going to love the whole prep school thing set in London…
Samantha: Blaine Anderson can get it. He can get me any time he wants. We would be so hot together. Yeah, I would make him scream so hard. Bring it, Anderson. You sell that scream-worthy sex-appeal. Work it, baby, work it for me.
Sarah: I am so over this blatant and, frankly, misogynistic attempt to get validation. Of course girls are going to think you’re hot. That’s what the uniforms and perfectly coiffed hair is trying to sell. And those fake, schmoozy smiles? I’m not falling for the schtick, boys. We are better than this, ladies. We shouldn’t be here - we should be out protesting this disgusting display of macho-ism. And a foam machine? Really? Isn’t that a little overkill? God, they’re totally falling for it, aren’t they? Typical.
Taylor: I don’t really understand the foam machine and bouncy balls, but the bubbles are so much fun!
Hannah: Is anyone else catching the weird kid doing kicks and strange faces? Just me? I shouldn’t laugh. Okay, I’m laughing, but I’m laughing with him. I think. This is a comedy bit, right?
Amanda: Oh my god, he looked right at me, I think I might faint. I’m totally giving him my phone number. You’ll just have to pick me off the floor first. Oh, I wonder if I actually faint one of them will try giving me CPR, hmmm.
Liz: I’m pretty sure this is the abandoned warehouse where that guy was murdered with a machete. There haven’t been any ghost sightings here, right? I am so not being here after nightfall.
Kayla: This isn’t doing anything for me. Should I be concerned? Oh god, maybe I’m a lesbian.
Meghan: ...Oh, oh...I want some more...Oh, oh...What are you waiting for...What are you waiting for...Say goodbye to my heart tonight...
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Take a Mosey on Down the Diagnosis Trail
Was I depressed? How depressed? Was it “clinical” or “seasonal” or “major”? From what I remember, at first I was clinically depressed. Sprinkle some Zoloft on it.
I didn’t like taking the Zoloft and whatever else I was prescribed; didn’t like the notion of having to take pills to be “normal”. As I know now, that is not an uncommon sentiment. I am pretty sure I was diagnosed within those same few years as having some anxiety disorder, but it was not an “official” diagnosis at first. I remember going back and forth with trying to accept this diagnosis and take my medication when I was supposed to. I had access to the internet back then, but it wasn’t like it is now. Not for most of us, anyway. We didn’t think of searching for things online and definitely couldn’t just type a vague idea in the web address bar and get anything other than an error message. Back then, free AOL CD’s were everywhere by the thousands and I began collecting them by the pounds in my bag and would just hide them in random places all over any house or place of business I found myself at.
Within the same year of being released after my first committal, my sister got arrested after snitching on her own damn self and my mom and I moved to a one road, one grocery store, no red-light town. We lived in an itty-bitty house, my window looking out onto a massive lot for semi-trucks to back up and turn around in (at least, that’s all they ever did right there) at the cotton factory. I could jump out of my window and be in said lot before I even completed taking a single step. There were adventures to be had there many intoxicated nights (one more serious than the rest), of the infinite types of adventures that would have resulted in death in most other instances. I’m lucky to be alive. “Lucky” doesn’t even begin to describe it. I hear stories about young women or men just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or making risky decisions, and not making it out alive -- and I feel like absolute shit knowing that I dodged so many bullets and they did not.
So, as I was saying, my mom and I lived in this house -- just us -- and things steadily devolved. Meaning: there was absolutely zero psychiatric care during that time. Loads and loads of self-medication, and lots of Live LiveJournal-ing (I have tried to recover the account, to no avail). Our house was the house for getting fucked up. It makes my heart palpitate and my guts twist to write this, so I am lucky (there’s that word again) that this is not a story detailing many of the happenings of that wretched place, or any of the wretched places that came after. This house is where my addict tendencies became known to me in a way, and where I developed an eating disorder.
I was never diagnosed with an eating disorder, but my best friend at the time Meghan and I would see who could go the longest without eating while taking fists full of diet pills (I always gravitated toward Metabolife) that we’d stolen up the street. We lived for the Pro-Ana sites/blogs that were around back then and used their tips and tricks and thin-spiration images daily. We ended up purging together after eating anything. We’d drink hot water and punch each other in the gut after jumping around for a while. We were competitive regarding things like who could get the next bone to be more pronounced, and how much we were able to purge vs how much we ate/drank, clothing size, weight, measurements, our side-effect symptoms of whatever we were taking or doing or just the whole mess in general, who bruised easier, who cut the most, the deepest -- who cut the most fucked up saying into which area of skin and using what -- and even our stools (speaks incredible volumes about your diet).
Meghan and I were extremely codependent. I spent those years with her cycling through an infinite amount of possible diagnoses, but I was never helped in any way. I remember a few episodes of psychosis or mania or whatever it was that are mixed with significant chunks of amnesia in my memory. When I think back on the few close friendships I had as an undiagnosed and untreated (or wrongly diagnosed and wrongly treated) person, I imagine that to the people who found themselves stuck in my orbit -- the people who found themselves hypnotized by my incredible vulnerability mixed with utter recklessness and abandon… it must have been awful for them. Especially when they eventually snapped out of their trance and saw what was happening to them because of my disastrous and dangerous ways. My willingness to go as low as one could imagine, at the blink of an eye. I annihilated souls one at a time -- but, for the very clear record, they were always willing participants. I never forced anyone’s hand. Maybe I obliterated the very essence of people, but by that point, they all chose their fates to be intertwined with my own.
In that itty-bitty house next to the cotton factory, my mom ended up abandoning me with a guy I had been dating for a couple of weeks, at most, and his mother ended up taking me in. I only have a few solid memories of that traumatic experience, as well as for the years that ensued at Robert’s house. I lived there, hurting myself in secret and having panic attacks and floating through the world only kind of remembering getting from one year to the next. There was more self-medicating and spiraling. Some cock fights. What I am saying is, there were a whole lot of years that I went untreated.
The next diagnosis that I remember is a Bipolar Disorder diagnosis. I have no idea if I was allegedly Bipolar I or II, but there were other diagnoses such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety, Panic Disorder, and PTSD. Everyone uses OCD so loosely, “Omg, I know; I’m (or someone else they know is) so OCD about…” That, or they think that everything I do is going to be immaculate and organized;  perfect. They don’t talk about the intrusive thoughts or the weird obsessions that no one can know about or the compulsive rituals we do that often have nothing to do with anything but if they don’t get done, something awful will happen and it will be all our fault. I remember when I was young I had the literal Fear of God in me. I was obsessed with death and Heaven and Hell. Thought about it all the time. I was told that God heard our thoughts and that he could always see us. Every night when I would lay down to go to bed, I forced myself to think of every single possible infraction I made that day and to beg God’s forgiveness for it while clutching my Precious Moments Bible. I lost a lot of sleep due to this and so it became increasingly more difficult to stay awake each night. I would pinch and scratch and slap myself to stay awake and beg for forgiveness. At some point I also began praying for the health and safety of every single family member I could think of and then for the health and safety of every person I could recall in my memory from being out and about during the day. I spent entire nights probing my memories for every possible soul who needed my prayers in order to be safe. I had to cycle through them, imagining God cupping his hand down around their home like a shield to keep bad guys from breaking in and to keep fires from happening or violent weather or someone from inside the home from hurting them or aliens from abducting and probing them (Fire in the Sky ruined my life that extra layer) or just whatever else my mind could come up with to be terrified of happening. I had to do this, and I had to do it as many times as humanly possible every night. I would, of course, pass out sometimes. I’d awake with a jolt and grab for my Bible. But, wait… what if it is upside down?! I would think. Surely there are crosses and other things within this Bible that would only invite evil and ensure my spot in Hell if inverted?!  And so I would get up, turn the light on, and check. Getting out of bed every time I was unsure whether or not the Bible was facing the correct way was exhausting -- more exhausting than this whole thing already was. I came up with a solution: tie a cord from the string on my light to the rail of my daybed. That barely lasted a night because I was convinced -- despite the cord being nowhere near slack enough -- that the shit would get wrapped around my neck and kill me (and I would likely die with an inverted Bible in my hands, before I could finish my prayers). Solution? Super-glue a penny into the top left corner inside the front cover of the Bible so that I could just feel in the dark which way the hateful thing was facing. Problem solved (still have the thing).
The next diagnosis I had was Bipolar with Rapid Cycling (maybe some of the readers can see where this is going at this point). Also, the PTSD was bumped up to C (complex)-PTSD. I was put on mood stabilizers, lithium, some new anti-psychotic that was promoted as something else through the commercials on television and anxiety medications. I was in my early twenties at this time. Maybe mid. No later than mid. I had lost my mind after the death of a loved one and uprooted my life with Aidyn to move to Savannah at the petitioning of a couple I had met while I worked at Taco Mac. The wife worked there with me, and the husband came up to see her a few times. He was a tattoo artist and had found work in Savannah. They had outed themselves as swingers to me and requested my presence in their bed more than once. Oh, and they were also the most intensely religious people I’d ever met in real life. I was told that I’d have a job in the tattoo shop so I talked a coworker, Christine, into going down there with me to scout an apartment and “interview” at the shop. Fast forward to meeting my husband and a while with him, having Shane -- There’s a whole lot of dirty and dangerous detail in there, with another couple of stints in hospitals, and a whole lot of Ambien being used for everything but sleeping before this point, but they’re not important to this story.
I have just brushed over something here that is a big issue: skin picking. Excoriation. That has been a daily habit ever since I can remember. I think I have glossed over it so far now because it is not an issue which we are currently dealing with and focused on, but it has gotten so bad on a number of occasions that we couldn’t even go in public. That is not specifically my thing and so I am not very familiar with it, but I do have access to some of the memories we have about it. 
After a couple of stays in jail and yet another hospital stay, I had the diagnosis of Schizoaffective Bipolar Disorder with Psychotic episodes. That one got me to the medications I am currently taking. All of my previous diagnoses still stand. I hit one of my bottoms during this time. There’s a whole lot more that I don’t remember than I do.
A few more stays in jail and a few years of sobriety later, and I had a diagnosis of DID. Dissociative Identity Disorder. I am still navigating that one. I’ve definitely been back forth and all around with this. I have mapped out a timeline of sorts in a journal, and it’s astounding how much sense this diagnosis makes. Finally: A diagnosis that actually fits all the way around. It is still quite alarming, and I am still trying to establish good communication between alters within my inner world and be more okay with referring to us as us or we or a system. We know now that the path we took could have never led us anywhere but here. We understand that only due to our most recent move to a place where we are safe with the kids, were we able to come forward and be known.
DID is a disorder rooted in trauma, and usually only makes itself known after the system has moved away from the direct influence or vicinity of the family member, caregiver, or other person (or people) who make it unsafe for parts of the system to be known. They were birthed by severe trauma and have existed for strictly covert missions to protect the other parts. Walls of amnesia are typically built up around the fractured pieces of personalities (this is always done at a young age -- usually sometime before seven to nine years old -- before personalities integrate into one personality), and stay up and operational in order to keep awareness of the trauma from reaching certain parts. When there’s no longer present and persistent perceived danger, these alters are often left with not knowing what to do with themselves and questioning their own validity and justification for living in an environment where no one needs to be protected. They have been operating within the system for so long in their own way of doing so, and the reactions of parts and systems to no longer being actively life-saving vary widely. They will reach out knowingly or not, and sometimes a system will even break down. 
My story is not atypical. It is a classic story of a journey down Diagnosis Trail through the mental healthcare system. The average amount of time for people to get to a correct diagnosis of DID is seven years after initially becoming a patient  within the mental healthcare system. Finding professionals who are willing to diagnose and treat dissociative disorders is a challenge, because despite the presence of the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-5 and clear cut texts on the treatment of DID, there are many people out there who have so little experience and knowledge of our disorder that they don’t “believe” in it.
This was my diagnosis journey, made intelligible and digestible as I could manage. I know that I touched on several different stories, and I definitely had to skip over so many significant times that came up as I was writing. I mean, I summed up multiple years at a time with just a couple of sentences, some of the time without even one actual meaningful memory to go with them. That’s what this blog is going to be for, in part; though, most of the details of my life are going to be published in my Memoirs. Thank you for reading and feel free to email me with or comment below any questions, comments, or concerns. 
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thebuniperspective-blog · 7 years ago
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The First Blog, Wherein I Come Out As Queer & Dunno How Long Titles On Tumblr Should Be: I Had a Weird Week
Hi, I’m Michael Bennett producer of The (Bunny) Buni Perspective! and I had a bad week. Kinda of an amazing week. And here I am, talking about things I’m now no longer embarrassed to disclose.
I’m going to talk about the week in sections as they come to me, so this might jump around a little, but it ends with Bunny Bennett and a promise to see you tomorrow.
Warning frank discussion of sex, pot and LSD use and cursing you fucking dumbshits. I promise not to be too gross.
I Joined, Figured Out, and Then Deleted Grindr, In One Single Day.
Pause for applause.
Grinder is not for highly specific queers. The title queer is feeling like the correctt word for me, as it also means weird. . So I’m polly, so far I’m deeply in love with two girls. I’ll be writing more about Heather and Meghan in the next few blogs. Promise girls.
I’m turned on by femininity. Not just sexually, feminine things were the bane of my childhood and now they draw me in. To make this simple my ideal girl, in pop culture for many, many reasons, is some variation of:
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  ...35 and inserting gifs that make you blush...shame....
The thing is, I have for years been drawn to femboys and just shoved the feeling down. I can see the first guy I wanted to ask on a date vividly in my mind. I have a really hard time explaining it, but if Pearl were a boy, he’d be my dream guy. 
I’m also polly, so on the Internet I’m a ‘faggot cuck’
I promise tomorrow I will discuss the polly aspect of my sexuality in ore detail, for now just know I’m just complicated. 
Ok so, how do I convay any of that on Grindr? I can’t. I want to have a conversation. You cannot say that because it starts ‘hey’ then it’s just dick pics or boring, predictable bullshit.
I had a big realization. I’m a fucking jerk. I’ve been chatting online for decades and have treated the majority as badly as these guys treated me. Not that I sent dick pics, but if they didn’t do what I wanted I wasn’t nice or polite. Often I wouldn’t read their info well. I dunno. I felt pretty bad being ignored and hit on cause apparently I’m adorable?
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...fat piece of shit.
The REALLY cute girls on grindr were a minimum 100 miles away. None want to do a long distant thing, which is really what I want right now. And frankly the guys I want to meet are girls. And I know I’m queer because the other day I said, ‘That cock is adorable’ and that is not what a straight man says. 
I feel a lot better saying all that. Let’s talk about my favorite game I need to quit.
I Can Spot A Catfish A Mile Away After Two Full Days Of Talking Out Loud
I was playing League and I out of no where got a friend request. I take all of these, usually remembering them from a recent game. Not this time. First thing ‘she’ said was “I always get call a catfish” DOT DOT DOT
This ‘girl’ played well, we chatted in game, ‘she’ was REALLY flirty and I bought ‘her’ many skins in game, maybe 50$ worth? Can’t remember for my embarrassment's sake. I begged this person to talk to me face to face on skype and they made it into a fight every time. So I cut it off.
This happened to me recently. This person refused to talk to me while we played games (me out loud into my headset, and ‘she’ replying in chat). Every hour I begged this person to talk to me in anyway. At first they told me they only spoke Japanese and ‘she’ was embarrassed about the language, ‘she’ understood me too well for that, think I literally said, ‘What are you Chewbacca?’
I basically just talked. They replied and were REALLY needy. I mentioned skins at last and they changed how they talked a lot but then suddenly, this person couldn’t talked to me because of childhood tongue biting induced tongue paralysis. Also their name was Soka Hui? Apparently?
They told me their family was massacred. Like RECENTLY. So I looked it up:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-wolf-family-murders-north-dakotas-most-brutal_us_57fbe48ae4b0b665ad818798
That’s scary tho if that person recorded me.
I Fell in Love With a Guy
I did not want to. I could hear the mocking voices of my brothers from my childhood, the ghosts of my high school, the word ‘faggot’ as anything but gross, not something that turned me on. Not something I whispered to a guy, begging me to...he didn’t love me. He sounded really fucking pretty when he said I love you. He said my name so beautifully the echo of it makes me cry as I write this now. 
I would have called him a fucking faggot in 1997 and been angry. Might have gotten violent.
Now I wish Dexter would just say anything, perched in my lap and...
Well it’s stupid to dwell on things. I learned a lesson. The lesson here is ‘you can’t win, but always try.’ 
Here’s why: I did everything right, this is how Meghan and I began. Dexter and I have talked on and off for months. For about 8...maybe a year. Dexter was my dirty little secret. 
He called me and moaned and we...you know whatever, but always behind Heather’s back (she knows now). I hated to admit that guy was really...
Well he got a hold of me at the beginning of the week.
He told me that he wanted me to make love to him, say ‘I love you’ to me on his boyfriend’s bed. I took this too mean he wanted me to be in love so...we talked. 
We talked for an hour and I was so in love. He was interesting and funny. He had comedy bits memorized. He loves Star Wars.I wanted to keep talking. I thought we’d at lest text later.
I wanted to Love Star Wars with him. I wanted to meet him and do whatever he wanted. He cut off the call...I should have known an hour was kind of short compared to girls I had talked to in the past.
I didn’t hear from him for 3 days.
I had all this confused love in me. I barfed it all up. He was masturbating. Trying to get me to talk about sex and I was stammering and nervous and near crying. I told he was my first guy...the guy I was in love with, for real and he cut me off. There was a really hard to describe, painful, awkward silence. 
I flashed back to all the folder of evidence I had that he loved me, the saw the mountain of facts that said he was just getting off to me using him. Or...something. We haven’t spoken since.
I told him ‘I have a lot of cosplay ideas’ and he laughed.
He said he had to go and I said ok. He said ‘Talk to y-’ but I hung up and threw the phone. Cried. Last my game of League. Told Heather and Meghan. Cried in the shower.
I told Meghan and Heather about this guy throughout the three days he went silent. Meghan has a number of really hot ideas involving some third male person. Heather is asexual but really really like the idea of live yaoi.
Dexy...Dexter hurt me, really badly. I tried anything for a few days to distract myself, the catfish, grindr, other guys I know from chat rooms. I over bared myself to them when I could just do that here and link it.
That leads me to:
If We Got Married No One Would Have to Change Their Last Names, Cartoonist Who Draws Like Me, Puppeteer Who Made a Way Better Puppet Than Me and I Love It and Other Reason Why I Might Be In Love With Isabella Bunny Bennett
A long time ago. And right now I’m pausing to see if I can find the thing...
Ok as far as I know it’s gone? Maybe I can get it from Linkara’s title card artist.
He and I interviewed Isabella back when she in the long ago times and it was one of the all time best conversations I had ever had in my life. She is bright and funny and clever and i’m crying again, what the...Ok I came back in twenty minutes later to fix this mess. I did start crying a little. It’s hard to remember it all but Bunny was so natural, we finished each other’s thoughts. I really wanted to talk forever. She’s so...shit literally crying...
This was a very long time ago, John was still in the band.I lost track and my internet presence took a nose dive. That will get many blogs.
Her twitter posts recently (Sept’17) are really lining up with how I feel.The normal places I thought I could meet someone online, are failing me. It’s frustrating, but I can do one thing at least. Flirt with Isabella. I flirt with art:
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I got no context for this guy at the bottom...he didn’t get my context clearly.
Anyway
...
.....
...in the song Burning in the Stratosphere she makes a kissy noise and says...’I love you’ but at the beginning in a near whisper...chills. I wasn’t expecting it, really hadn’t visited the album it’s on til tonight.
I hope to talk more about Isabella in the future. I’m a chaos magician, so it’s likely to happen.
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amorremanet · 7 years ago
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top 5 movies? and why? no no TOP FIVE BOOKS
oh gosh, both of these are hard and my answers for them are probably so boring (they also come with the, “this is just how I feel right now because ugh, I am the worst at picking any all-time faves for broad categories”) — but!!
top “five” movies:
The Prince of Egypt — has some of the most beautiful art that I’ve ever seen, anywhere, and music that sticks with you, and it really shows the human drama and human stakes of such a classic story in ways that a lot of adaptations of Biblical mythology are afraid to do
Deadpool — because I’m garbage, the characters are great, the script is pretty good, and the movie makes me laugh. It’s not really a deconstruction (in the way that some people make it out to be, by way of justifying why they like it), and it’s not super-intellectual, and in a lot of ways, it’s like a giant #SorryNotSorry that makes fun of superhero movie tropes while continuing to use them (and there are some subtle ways it plays with some of said tropes and twists them around, but it largely doesn’t) — but it’s fun
But I’m A Cheerleader — is far from perfect, and I maintain that it’s actually much more depressing than the ending leads us to believe (I mean, Meghan/Graham and Dolph/Clayton get together and escape from True Directions and homophobic parents, and Meghan’s Mom and Dad at least try to do better by their daughter, but things don’t work out that well for anybody else), but it’ll always have a special place in my heart because it was one of the only lesbian movies that I had access to as a little gay baby
Female Trouble — I wouldn’t say that it’s the best thing that John Waters has ever done, just the one that I personally like the best, and I’ll admit that it’s probably an acquired taste…… but I love how it takes on celebrity culture in the story Dawn Davenport, and it gave us great lines like, “The world of heterosexual is a sick and boring life” and, “I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!” It also has a special place in my heart as one of my favorite, “gay AND weird” movies
—which probably makes sense, given that it was written and directed by the trash king of being gay and weird
……like, seriously. My (best friend who I call my) brother once asked me, “So is John Waters gay or is he just really weird?” and the only thing I could think of to say to that was, “Yes, both.”
the “Three Flavours Cornetto” trilogy — which is totally cheating, to put three in here, but I couldn’t pick between them. I do think that Hot Fuzz and The World’s End are more fully actualized than Shaun of the Dead, but I love all of them, and the reason is pretty much just, “Because they’re good mixes of being hilarious and making me FEEL things” (……less so in The World’s End, for several reasons; it’s a lot heavier on the feels, to the point that you sometimes feel bad for laughing at the jokes, but still)
and books:
Good Omens (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman) — This book was my introduction to both PTerry and GNeil, after I found a cheap copy in an airport bookstore when I was about twelve and immediately fell in love. It’s funny, the characters are vibrant and engaging, and it played right into my love of screwing around with Biblical mythology.
I’m periodically tempted to list different books for both of those men (with PTerry’s probably being one of the Granny Weatherwax books, or Faust Eric, and GNeil’s being either American Gods or one of his Sandman books — because yeah, he’s done other good stuff, but I’m more sentimentally attached to AG and Sandman. Also, Preludes and Nocturnes has some of the only non-movie or TV horror that has genuinely terrified me, so)
—buuuut then I never do, because Good Omens was my first book from either of them, and remains my sentimental fave, even though I admit that they’ve both written other books that are, “better” or, “stronger,” or whatever
Dry (Augusten Burroughs) — There’s a lot of fair criticism to be made of Augusten Burroughs, and he’s been one of the writers at the center of the debates about truthfulness or lack thereof in popular memoirs (like, how much an author is allowed to condense things before it stops counting as a, “real story,” and how an author remembers things happening vs. how other people remember them), but Dry nevertheless means a lot to me.
Like, I enjoyed Running with Scissors and his novel, Sellevision (which were the other Big Deals in his collected works, at the time I originally read Dry), but Dry fucked me up a LOT when I first read it. It has continued to fuck me up ever since.
There are passages in this book that I can’t even be jealous of, as another writer, because they’re so good that they skip right the fuck past, “I’m angry and jealous that I didn’t write this myself” and into, “Holy shit, THIS is why I write, the ability to do THIS KIND OF THING EXACTLY with words, I need to go write something right now”
Also, it means a lot to me for sentimental, “I read this book for the first time when I was in high school, and it made me feel less lonely and sad and scared” reasons
Dynamic Characters (Nancy Kress) — This is by no means the be-all and end-all of, “how to writer better” books, but it’s a personal favorite of mine, for two reasons: 1. there are some things that Kress doesn’t cover about creating characters and doing better by them in your writing, but she’s still pretty comprehensive and offers some solid illustrative examples, multiple perspectives on this part of writing (not as many as she could, but to be fair, she only has so many pages to work with), and a good mix of “tough love” advice and gentler, more reassuring advice;
and 2. …it was the first, “how to writer better” book that I ever got my hands on. I picked it out specifically because I’d posted a completely ridiculous crack fic that was a crossover between Harry Potter and Sailor Moon, with a first-person protagonist narrator who was a hot nonsense self-insert power fantasy Mary Sue with no flaws and no nuance because, hey, I was 11.
And someone actually commented to go, “Hey, look, you have talent, but you could do better and one place to start is maybe with learning to build better realized characters” — so I picked out the Nancy Kress book and it seems like a really silly thing to call a turning point? But it was big a turning point for me
Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (José Alaniz) — okay, time for me to be a loser and cite an academic book. I’m also probably a cheating loser, since I just read this book for the first time recently…… but with that said? I’ve read a LOT of critical treatments of the superhero genre, some pretty good, others pretty bad (for example, I remain Perpetually Tired of Slavoj Žižek’s heavy metal Communist, Bane in Leather Pants bullshit reading of The Dark Knight Returns), and most of it somewhere in the middle
—but there’s this trend among people who write critically about superhero junk, whether they’re academics of not, wherein we act like we have to act like superhero comics are The Most Progressive Ever and oversell their sociopolitical impact in order to make them look like ~*True Art*~ That Must Be Taken Seriously (—and like, I’m not saying that they have NO impact on people at all, because that’s objectively false. But you also can’t try to claim that Superman, Wonder Woman, and Captain America comics are why the Allies won World War II)
(this is a pointless aside to note that I deliberately left the Goddamn Batman off that list, because while Supes, Diana, and Steve were all off punching Nazis, Golden Age Bruce and white boy!Dick were running around on the home-front, rounding up Japanese Americans and putting them in internment camps. So… y’know. There’s that.)
……or we have to take legitimate criticisms of problems in the superhero genre, both historical and current, and use them to go, “Therefore, the entire genre is pointless garbage that has no redeeming qualities at all and could never ever EVER be used to tell any stories that are worth telling, and frankly, you are all terrible, horrible people for enjoying it, how very dare you enjoy that X-Men movie or that Red Hood And The Outlaws comic, you’re basically a fascist now”
—which is hilarious, to me, because the people who write that sort of criticism almost always cite Fredric Wertham’s book, The Seduction of the Innocent (aka: the book that led to so much moral outrage over the allegedly very gay and fascistic, child-corrupting content of comicbooks that the Comics Code Authority was created), and they always go, “Well, obviously Wertham was OTT and totally full of shit, buuuut…… *argument that would not have been out of place in his book*”
So, one of the big reasons I loved Professor Alaniz’s book is that is does neither of these things. It offers some incisive, and occasionally kinda damning, critique of the superhero genre and its handling of disability and mortality, but he does so from a place of love and enjoyment, and never pretends to hate the genre, nor argues for throwing the whole thing out because it has problems.
Like, his underlying mindset is very much, “Yes, the superhero genre has a LOT of problems, but people could, in theory, fix them and try to get closer to realizing the full potential of what these characters and stories can do” — while never skimping on a detailed analysis of the trends and case studies that he presents.
Sometimes, I think he’s kinda reaching (and I, personally, never want to hear anything about Doctor Doom’s Oedipus complex ever again so long as I live, though it was validating to hear that my theatre kids AU version of him — who is a ridiculous mess, obsessed with taking selfies, and perpetually acting like he totally gets everything while missing some crucial detail, which is how he ends up thinking that Loki is dating Tony Stank [a suggestion that makes both of them want to puke] — is actually a valid interpretation of his character, based on some parts of canon)
Overall, though, my biggest problem with Professor Alaniz’s book is that he can be kind of a hipster and it can get a little bit annoying. Not enough to ruin the whole book, but enough that it does stand out.
Like, his chapter on Daredevil specifically analyzes an infamous Silver Age story that basically everyone hated — the one where Matt Murdock tells Karen and Foggy that he isn’t the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, but he has some heretofore unknown identical twin brother named Mike, who is not blind but *IS* actually that aforementioned costumed hero, and carries on a charade of pretending to be his nonexistent twin brother — and okay, we get some pretty neat discussion of how passing can work or might not with disabled people
…but you can still walk away feeling like his biggest reason for analyzing that story arc was less about its value to any part of his discussion, and more about going, “Other Daredevil stories are too mainstream, I care most about this one that was so infamously ridiculous that people have said even soap operas wouldn’t have done this plot”
Likewise, I’m not saying that there aren’t very fair criticisms to be made of the X-Men and how their stories handle disability in particular… but at some points in his chapter on the Silver Age Doom Patrol comics, Professor Alaniz seems to be less, “using the pre-Claremont Silver Age X-Men stories as an illustrative foil to the Doom Patrol, especially with regard to how Charles’s paraplegia is treated vs. how The Chief’s paraplegia is treated” and more, “using this discussion as a free excuse to bash on the X-Men for being popular”
To his credit, Professor Alaniz does kinda discuss some of the ways that the X-Men’s popularity might have been affected by the fact that things like their ableist handling of Charles make them feel, “safer” and, “less sociopolitically threatening” than he makes the Doom Patrol out to be (with a pretty convincing argument, actually)
He just doesn’t do it enough for me to feel like his “criticism” of the X-Men isn’t at least partially grounded in going, “Well, it’s popular, therefore it sucks” (—as opposed to my approach to them, which is, “It’s popular, and has a mixed bag of things that it does well vs. things it does that suck, but it does not suck BECAUSE it is popular”)
Anyway, good book, and it’s written in a refreshingly accessible way (it’s still an academic book and harder to get into than, say, Good Omens, but Professor Alaniz doesn’t make a lot of the more common mistakes that leave a lot of academic writing effectively incomprehensible)
and last but not least…… Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire (we all know who wrote this, okay, come on) — because I’d be lying if I didn’t include at least one HP book on this list, considering how important those books and that fandom have been to the course of my life and to my development as a writer, and it was either gonna be this one or POA, but this one won over the other because I’m garbage
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amplesalty · 7 years ago
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Day 6 - The Christmas Blessing (2005)
On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
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Six margaritas!
Some years ago I watched a little TV movie called 'The Christmas Shoes' all about how one little boy's desperate struggle to give his dying mother one last Christmas gift can really make one jaded man re-evalulate his love for God...or something. At the time I managed to somehow overlook the fact that was actually the first in a trilogy of movie, this being the second part. Yeah, I'm setting up a lot of sequel hooks this year.
What, no Christmas Shoes 2: Electric Boogaloo? At least it's based on an actual book this time, not some dumb song.
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We see Rob Lowe's character leaving church and he happens upon the fabled Christmas Shoes. This is not a dumpster as I first thought, rather a community outreach thing where people leaves clothes and stuff.
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Clearly this is a major plot hole as the shoes were very much left on the mother's grave at the end of the first movie. I hope someone got fired over that one.
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Meanwhile, NPH is in this flick and his buddy here is talking about trying to hook him up with some hot chick. Yeah, about that..
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He plays Nathan, a surgeon, who has a crisis of confidence when one of his patients dies on the operating table so he has to take a break for a little while, head home, relax.
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Whilst he's home he starts dreaming about...the Christmas Shoes?
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OK, so he's the grown up kid from the first movie. They do touch upon the timeline of it all, saying he was 10 when his mother died and he's in his 'late 20's' now so I guess that about ties up? I mean, if he's a surgeon, from what I gather that takes like 4 years of college, 4 of med school and another 5 in residency so he's probably early on in that. Or hell, maybe he's been a fully qualified surgeon for years now. He is Dougie Howser after all.
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His dad is still running his auto-repair shop and clearly things haven't changed in the past 20 years because NPH is ragging on his out of date equipment. Just because you're a people doctor, don't make you a car doctor. Don't come around here talking ill on your Dad's sop, buddy.
His grandma is trying to talk his dad into getting with the times, she has a friend who's got half the shops in town on the internet. Clearly this is of it's time, when people thought the internet was the answer to everything. Not everyone needs an online presence, do people pick out their mechanic by how flashy their website is?
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Meanwhile, that little twerp from Two and Half Men is in this movie as well.
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And that crazy chick from Urban Legend. Maybe this is where she ended up after that movie? She was still alive at the end after all...
She's teaching all the little kiddies about Cinco de Mayo for some reason. Wouldn't that have been a better subject to teach, you know, in Mayo? And why are we teaching these kids Mexican history anyway? #MAGA
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She wants to buy this old house next to the school and turn it into a day-care center. There's a story going on with Nathan at the same time that his dad wants to sell up and move away. Nathan is reluctant for the house he grew up in to be sold off so he's looking into a mortgage to buy it. It's right about here that I thought this would all end with him having to choose between buying his childhood home or the day-care center but clearly I am niave to the way of the Hallmark movie.
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Because every man, woman and child is sick in the movie. Meghan's friend's baby is sick...
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Meghan is sick...
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The little kid is sick. Not much danger of Nathan's colleagues forgetting about him, he's in there visiting every bloody day.
In between everyone being on death's door, the kid is writing a paper about his mum but his dad has been feeding him lies this entire time. Rather than just say she's dead, he tells him that she walked out on them years ago and is an actress now, or a singer, or a dancer...it's hard to keep the same story all the time. He tells him she's dancing with some Fred guy.
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So the kid is asking Meghan about who this Fred might be and she figures Fred Astaire. Look, I know this movie has a bit of a weird timeline but I'm pretty sure she's not dancing with Fred Astaire. Nor does Fred Astaire's dancing look like the kind she's demonstrating. His was much more of the ceiling variety. I do love this scene though, everything goes into this sort of romantic slow motion and the kid is looking at her in awe. Maybe this is one of those 'other' kind of Hallmark movies Grumpy Cat was talking about, the kid where the school teacher seduces her student.
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The movie is giving me blue balls on the whole Rob Lowe and NPH recognising each other thing. They keep bumping into each other but never realise who the other is.
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Then again, you can't blame them, Nathan looked totally different the last time they met...
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He's taking that whole 'selling the house' thing well then...
But yeah, that whole everyone dying thing, it might appear harsh that God would allow a 10 year old to suffer from heart failure and allow him to die but, mysterious ways and all that. He is taking Charlie away, he's receiving him. He just needs a new basketball player is all. You'd think he'd rapture up someone from the NBA for that. Shit, they need to turn that LeBron James reboot of Space Jam into some Heaven vs Hell thing, five of the NBA’s best vs five disgraced players given super powers after selling their souls.
Since he's on the way there anyway, he asks Nathan if he's got a message for him to pass on to his mother. Bloody hell this is grim.
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And his dying wish is that he can donate his liver to his teacher so she can live. I'm no fancy city doctor or nothing, but surely as an adult, you'd need another functioning adult organ to be compatible? And if anything, he looks more like the one with liver problems. Kid looks jaundiced as hell.
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Instead of Nathan buying the house as I had originally though, it's the lawyer who's on the line for another Christmas gift of philanthropy. Only, this time it's not $20 he's out, more like several tens of thousands of dollars, if not upwards of $100k. How much does a house go for in New England anyway?
I must say, I was expecting more from this serendipitous meeting twenty years in the making. For how much this incident is meant to have changed their lives, I thought it would be this entire over the top moment of them weeping into each other's arms about how their lives changed forever that night. But no, it's just like "I was a jerk once, then I bought some shoes for this kid." "Wait, that was me!" "Neat. Anyway, here's that house you wanted."
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Nevermind that shit, Blake Shelton is here everybody!
Yeah, I don't know who that is.
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