#i am working on some applications of this

[closetcasefabray]

jesus saves (i spend)

i have been writing parts of an avatrice college au for two gd years now. the ideas & writing are scattered between here (one of the tags below should work), my whatsapp convos with @snowandwolves, on discord, my dinosaur laptop that crashes, & my email. it’s a fucking disaster but whatever so am i & not once in my life have i had my shit together so this is all unsurprising.

SO what i’m saying is, here’s the only part i have ‘formally’ written in fic form bc i posted that other ficlet. doing this made me almost throw my dino laptop & my phone out a window on several occasions—that’s why there isn’t more. but i just wanna share this.

more notes & rambles at the end.

//

You notice her because it's syllabus week of your freshman year, it's an 8 AM class, and you're fairly confident you're still drunk from the party you attended last night, but she raises her hand and correctly answers a question posed by your theology professor without hesitation. Your professor, Father Vincent, was likely hoping for a good guess at best, but there she is, exceeding expectations from the moment she speaks. You pickup on an accent, which you would find incredibly attractive if you weren't so thrown by her perfect and concise response, like a well-prepared speech is always readily accessible in the back of her mind—a girl with all the answers. A young woman, really. 

You, however, are not—you're just a girl. You're just a girl who shows up to her morning classes smelling like the bar or the house party from the night before, like the weed you started smoking almost immediately upon arriving to university during orientation week, like the cigarettes you smoke because it affords you a little more quiet outside and an excuse to borrow a lighter and talk to a cute boy or a pretty girl.

You're just a girl who technically died, existed in nothingness for a whole minute before being ripped back into a reality of blank ceilings and the sound of your heartbeat in your ears. You're just a girl strangers prayed for after they heard about the American child pulled from the wreckage. You're just a girl who didn't get any credit for teaching herself to stand again, to walk again—and if you’re being completely honest, you’re a girl who’s incredibly bitter that a god you never saw in that one minute got all the credit and none of the blame—for taking your mother from you, for taking years from you that had to be spent healing from god’s grace or lack thereof. 

You're just a girl who is tired of being told to look at her life as an expression of holiness, who thinks it is more so the consequence of indifferent stardust. But you still look for the beauty in that, in humanity and its flaws—these meaningless beings in a vast universe, creating and destroying their own little, myopic worlds on this spinning rock. Some will dream of poetry for their lovers, and some will dream of arsenals to level cities. You wonder how many lips were pressed together in a final kiss versus hands clasped together in prayer when fire fell from the sky in the name of God. You wonder what that says about faith.

You'd like to think if your mother could see you, she'd laugh at the irony because once you were baptized, she never took you to church. God finds a way, so you spent five miserable years in a Catholic orphanage before you were sent back to America. People said you were lucky to have two years in a foster family at your age, but it felt like living with strangers who were tasked with the minimum of keeping you alive. Then you were moved into a home for teen girls with a nun at the helm, and that’s where you actually felt fortunate for the first time in years. It was there that Mother Superion helped you with your studies and college applications. So here you are, tipping into a hangover in one of the oldest buildings on campus, learning theology from a priest.

But your mom would understand. (You don’t remember much of her, and you try not to think about that too deeply, or else you have to deal with the resulting ache that comes from reaching inside yourself for something that’s gone.) You have spliced together what you can recall into a short reel—you mom buckling into your car seat while humming a show tune, showing you how to fold a pizza slice and telling about a city famous for their pizza, and holding your hand in a museum in Spain, promising to take you to another big museum closer to home, the home you never saw again. So you promised yourself and the parts of her you carry that you’d make it here.

You would have had to pay almost full tuition if you wished to attend your reach, requiring immense debt, so you ended up at the school that offered you a ticket to the city and a hefty enough scholarship you could get through four years without requiring loans or a full-time job to afford it. (You first refused to use your mother’s death as a sob story in you application letter, but Mother Superion put her hand on yours and said, So rarely do these letters contain truth, but do not be afraid to tell yours. In telling your truth there is a sadness, yes—and I know you detest pity—but of all the things that have been taken from you, do not feel guilty for taking some of it back to live a better life.) You remember getting your acceptance letter, and looking up at the sky and flipping it off, praying whatever god hears you, No thanks to you!

But your bitterness temporarily takes a backseat in your mind as you look at your classmate, beautiful in the refracted light shining through the stained glass window, speaking so graciously of god you'd think Jesus were in the room, about to hand her his latest work. It's poetry, bordering on scripture in a new tongue, and you'd almost be a believer if it didn't sound as if she had repeated these words—practiced—enough times to believe them herself. You wonder what that says about her faith.

If the nuns at the orphanage had spoken the gospel as she does, maybe you'd be here for different reasons. You're fascinated.

Behold, you are beautiful…

//

i promise this fic gets lighter & has some silliness. so some notes/tangents:

this is 100% self-indulgence bc i heard ‘write what you know’ & ran with that shit. when i visited a friend at a state school in a college town i was so so confused bc it was just a diff campus culture entirely. then i was going to make this set in an ambiguous city, but i literally have saved places in google maps that would be great places to kiss someone sooooo you get NY avatrice.

likely setting this before instagram & smartphones bc i’m old/lazy & i can.

the title is from st. vincent who my friend introduced me to in college. “paris is burning” changed my brain chemistry & so i listened to her music on repeat for ages—“jesus saves, i spend” is on the same album.

father vincent will not be a bad man or evil professor. he will be as he was before adriel—a lost man who found himself through god & still a little broken but caring & devout.

also song of songs/song of solomon is like… the only part of the bible i fucked with in theology class so that’s the reference at the end. also another line used in another scene with JC, chanel, & ava written in v rough form. maybe will share that later.

this is meant to be a fic with a post-grad sequel as well. not much written of that but a lot of ideas everywhere.

once i figure out where i’m moving (hahahaha i’m so stressed), i’ll consider a ko-fi or something (i wish emails & names weren’t shown though). but mostly i will likely need a second job to save up for an actually good computer/macbook. once i have that i’ll be able to post on ao3.

anyway thanks for reading & being here :3

[max1461]

Frankly what I would really like is for somebody to just hand me a job. I know I could do a job, I know I could produce good work for any company that wants to hire me to do something sort of technical-adjacent. But at least in my current state of mind I truly cannot find a job, the application process combines everything that I am innately not so good at (paperwork, marketing-style writing, transactional social interaction) and which is therefore disproportionately affected by my not so great mental health. That's the uh, that's the fucked up bit. I don't think my mental health would prevent me from working, just that it's presently making it really hard to find a job, and in order for my mental health to improve (imo) I need to be doing something that feels productive, like fucking working, instead of sitting around all day. It's a nasty catch-22, which I would like someone to resolve by just handing me a job without the rigamarole please.

I recognize there are jobs you can get with less rigamarole, things like service jobs and so on. Unfortunately, these are the kinds of things that imo my mental health would prevent me from doing effectively at the moment. Like I am perfectly capable of doing some data fuckery or whatever but I think if I had to wait tables I would just have a panic attack on the first day.

And I really, really want to stop living with family so I would like to find something uh. Sooner rather than later.

Can someone who owns a fucking company just give me a job fucking your spreadsheets or whatever the fuck already. I swear to fucking god I can fuck spreadsheets like a motherfucker and without complaint.

[tenspontaneite]

A robot can have evil little electricity eating tentacles in their wrists. As a treat.

(This is pretty much just a Seven Red Suns Hand/Harvester ref for Assembly)

[handweavers]

Have you ever dyed with irises? My mom and I were tending our flowers and the irises stained our hands purple 😂

unfortunately the primary pigments in irises that cause the lovely purple colour are anthocyanins, which aren't capable of undergoing the dyeing process (dyeing referring to a specific chemical reaction that bonds certain pigments with fiber) they can 'stain' fiber but they can't properly form bonds to it. further, anthocyanins are unstable when exposed to light and air so the pigments fade and discolour quickly. this is why beets, berries, black rice, and purple-blue flowers aren't used in dyeing cloth. they work well as food dyes and can be used to make interesting (although fugitive, ie. unstable) inks and paints, but they aren't suited to being used to dye materials

hibiscus flowers contain strong anthocyanins that make a beautiful, pH sensitive ink that is really fun to experiment with. by combining anthocyanin pigments with soya milk and thickeners i've been able to apply the pigments to cloth in a way that resembles dyeing but is more like paint (tiny particles attached to the surface by the soya milk binder, rather than dye colourants forming molecular bonds that alter the fiber, and the cloth feels more stiff as a result) and that has been fun too. but even those experiments fade heavily when exposed to natural light and just a couple washings

[captain-astors]

Creature. (The rendered ones are referenced from manga panels)

[wundrousarts]

This new community thing makes no sense to me, and I struggle to see the purpose, but I put in a thing anyways to make a public general Nevermoor one and then a private Silverborn Spoilers one to keep that stuff contained until a wider release so people can try to avoid stuff easier. There's literally no way to see updates on the approval process so I guess we'll see in like a month if either of them get made, lol.

[averlym]

ghostwriter (their grandma would tell them she'd lose half her soul)

[ante--meridiem]

Got an assessment back from one of my applications and while I still don't know if they'll actually pick me or not it is a relief to have formal confirmation that my applications aren't considered embarrassingly bad.

[solfinite]

hi guys!! im hopefully back now^^;

[thunderon]

advice on getting a job as a teenager? like do u truly just go in there and ask

i worked like five different (shitty minimum wage) jobs by the time i had turned 18 and honestly sometimes it really does come down to just going to your local shitty fast food joint and tracking down the 38yo manager named Ryan or Rick or something and asking if they’re hiring and hey, they are! cuz john who did the food prep just got arrested last week soooo when can you start? how bout right now? nah you don’t need a uniform c’mon get back here. look here’s how you work the giant industrial meat slicer! now you gotta slice faster than that because dinner rush is in twenty minutes and—

[waspgrave]

it's SOOOOO hard knowing the people at HR when you're applying for a position still at the same place you already work. Like 'hiiii becky how's the day going i hope the kids are doing well.....APPROVE MY APPLICATION RIGHT NOW DO IT I'M BEGGING. Pwease <3 how was your weekend?'

[lesbiansanemi]

Google how to make peace with the fact that you will always be vaguely to extremely uncomfortable (depending on the day) with your body and how others perceive it until the day you die and nothing you do will ever change that

[a-teardrop-of-the-sun]

what do y'all think. will they uh. accept this

[squisheebugdoodles]

@gyapona sent me this gender sheet from twitter user kr00bs to do a couple of months ago and it took me a bit to get to it but it was super fun! i was a little stumped on the soul section so there's a couple different variations on what it feels like to Me!!

Blank beneath the cut 83

[dandyshucks]

literally every item except for the pkmn game 😭 which, I should be clear, i am very very grateful for fjkdkl i was actually not expecting to receive more than two or three things, and the frying pan will be immensely useful djdkdl but aough there is a certain disappointment to the game not being one of the gifts fjdjkl

[cyanspica]

your jamilmads fic has me going wild, eagerly awaiting more. are you cool with fanart being made for it? - ratsnu

am i cool with that??? NO I am SO NOT COOL i am THRILLED i would SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST AND FROTH AT THE MOUTH IF YOU DID 😳😳😳😳 my hands and heart are open 🤲🏼🤲🏼🤲🏼🤲🏼