#ill actually do some work on the blog tomorrow... i need to put everything submitted in the past few days into my spreadsheet

[do-you-know-this-adhd-character]

good enough for now. night

[velvetsehun]

hiiii i've been a follower of yours for quite a while and i absolutely love your writings!!! i hope you don't mind me asking since this question is not related to your blog, but it's my first year of college and now that classes are online because of covid 19, i feel so overwhelmed with my work, like i have so many papers and projects all due in the same week and i feel mentally exhausted and just giving up. i honestly don't know how to deal with this, i was hoping you'd give me some advice? 😭

hello lovely! thank you, im glad you enjoy them, its whats they’re there for ;)

I’d be glad to give you some advice, i understand things are tough right now due to the virus, im obviously a uni student myself rn and i had to work out how to do everything so that i dont cry! 

I think the first thing to approaching school is to first of all, take a step back and actually evaluate what it is you have to do - i’ve go 3 essays due the same week as well and the first thing i did was step back, look at the deadlines and then look at the time that i have, its very easy to just see deadlines and think “i have to do all of this right now or it wont get done” which is partly whats overwhelming you! my main factor to planning out work is to put the due day into my google calendar, and then look at the days you have and be realistic with how long it takes to do thing! i’ll write it down in the calendar that way i HAVE to do it. ALSO GIVE YOURSELF AT LEAST A DAY OR TWO BEFORE YOU START!!

It takes me 2-3 days to plan, write and edit an essay (1500-2000 words) and i keep that in mind when i plan, so ill typically dedicate time to each thing i have to do, with a 2-3 day gap in between them! so from today until the 28th, ill be working on an essay, and today specifically ill be making an essay plan and thats all ill do today! 

ill plan my essay, breakdown the paragraphs and their contents, find key reading and then ill just leave it for the rest of the day, give your mind some time to process what it is you’re writing, and then tomorrow ill write! i typically do an hour of writing then 45 minute break, and i’ll do a paragraph in an hour! that way im not dedicating 9 hours to just starting at a word doc, im taking breaks inbetween! you’ll stress your mind out just focusing on one thing for hours on end! and after a few hours the essay is written and then ill leave it again! 

then on the 28th, ill go in and grammar/word check it, make sure it makes sense and read it over and if i feel like it, ill submit it same day! then after ive done that essay, ill take a 2-3 rest and start something new, that way im not bogging my mind down with everything! it also helps to REFERENCE AS YOU GO PLEASE OMG it makes it so much easier, use a website like citethisforme and you’ll save about an hour! 

it get its hard to apply yourself to doing the work in the first place when you’re stuck in the house, but what helps me is getting ready like its a normal day, getting out of pajamas and wearing real people clothes, maybe going for a quick walk outside and then coming back to start your work - that what you’re convincing yourself almost that you’re actually somewhere else and you start to feel a lot less cooped up!

im also someone who cant listen to “loud” music when im writing, so ill literally listen to it on the lowest volume i can still here so that my brain isnt focusing on something else while im trying to write!

here’s an example of what my calendar can look like (i cant show you my actual one since its got personal stuff on it but here’s a good example!):

also! its very important to practice some form of self-care in any break you get! I’m my 45 minute breaks between paragraphs ill make food, ill watch something, maybe write a little, ill talk to someone, ill sometimes just go out into the garden and look around! anything that isnt directly tied to the task im doing so that my break relaxes for a second! 

in my longer breaks between days, ill dedicate my time to other things that i have to do or want to do; ill do some yoga, ill write, ill read, ill cook/bake! 

Its very easy to just want to give up completely, and i completely understand that, but building a routine can really help you and understanding that you CAN do the work, you ARE capable, and that is IS doable; you just need to breathe and look at things a little differently, your own headspace can become uninhabitable so for a little while take a step out of that, and remember that you are a fully capable human and you have feelings! they can be tricky but once you understand how to manage them it gets better, you arent a bad person for wanting to just give up, you just need a little shove! 

I hope this helps! obviously i’m not a professional, i’m just another person, but my own mental health struggles taught me to start doing things another way if i wanted to get better or otherwise im living in a head in which is not meant for living in! 

I believe in you okay? and i know fine well that all the virus stuff is making all of us a bit stuck in a rut, we cant cure it but we can show it that we work with it - you’re fully capable and you’re going to do these assignments to the best of your ability! 

[tellcardtowrite]

Sass!verse. Altair and Malik's kids are given their choice of bedtime story. They want the story of how their fathers fell in love.

“Dad!” was a sudden interruption of a lazy afternoon.  Malik was half-way to sleeping in his desk chair with his fingers poised over the keyboard while he tried to slog through yet another stupid essay submitted to him from the blank-minded morons that took his class.  (And the whole time he was falling asleep to the resounding echos of stupidity ringing from the essay before him, he thought he could hear Kadar laughing the way he’d laughed when Malik said he was going to try to be a teacher.)  Jaida stomped into his office clutching her tablet in one hand and her face in a grim frown.

“What?” he asked.  

“So you remember,” had never (in his memory) ended with anything positive, “that time I asked Dad about how you met and he said something about how you met at a prom?”

No he didn’t.  “Yes?” Malik said.

“And you remember how he made it seem like you met and fell in love and everything was great except that you wouldn’t let me date Thomas Sanderbridge when I was eight because he was too old for me but he was apparently allowed to show up and date you when you were still in high school?”

No.  “I don’t know that he said it was okay.”

“Well, it wasn’t,” was the wisdom of a sixteen year old on the constant verge of suing for emancipation and buying a yacht in the Caribbean.  At which point she lifted up the tablet in her hand like she’d found the final definitive proof that her parents were the terrible people.  (Making her take a language in high school and snowballed into a constant battle of wills.  Altair’s response to Jaida throwing a fit over high school French was to refuse to speak to her in any language but French.)  

“I don’t know what–”

“True to form,” Jaida all but screamed at him, “Mr. Ibn-La’Ahad, not even a full fourteen hours after attending a prom at Castle-Mount High School, manages to spread ill-inform…”  Her voice trailed off when he sat back in his seat and let out a sigh.  “Oh?” she snapped at him.  “So you didn’t think that at some point any of your children would accidentally run into this information on the internet?”

Malik tried to imagine what the correct response to that statement was.  (The way he often found himself trying to figure out what the correct response to Jaida’s bizarre cross between his analysis and her father’s anger should be.)  “How much of it have you read?” he asked.

“Like three months of you bashing everything about Dad,” she said.  “I don’t see the happily ever after–and you were like seventeen,” hissed out like a swear word.  “What did Grandma even do?  What were you even thinking?  Is this why I can’t date a senior?”

“Do you think we’re happy now?” he asked.

Jaida’s anger didn’t deflate but shift, her hand motioned sideways dismissively, “yes.  I mean, I don’t think he’s super thrilled you’re suddenly a professor but he’s a spoiled brat so who cares.”

“Jaida,” was calm and he motioned to the seat at the side of his desk.  She came and dropped into as heavy as a stone, slapped her tablet against her lap and stared at him with the very bitterest of defiance.  “The truth is, I hated him.  I hated everything about your father.  He was an unhappy, awful person that went to a prom full of teenagers he didn’t belong around, got drunk, had sex with me and left me alone in a hotel room the next morning.”

“But why can’t I date?” Jaida demanded.

“Because you’re flunking French on purpose.”

She scowled at her knees, like they were solely to blame for that.  “Look, I already know more languages than half the kids that go to that school.  I can speak Italian and Arabic and English and I don’t understand why I have to take French.”

“Because it’s a requirement to graduate.  You’re not taking a stand against your oppressive parents by failing French, you’re being pointlessly stubborn against the inevitable.  You can’t date as long as you persist, the fact that the boy is a senior doesn’t matter.  Until he graduates, then it matters.”

Jaida slapped her tablet on his desk and crossed her arms over her chest.  “Well, Dad doesn’t have to be so–” a hundred different slurs crossed her mind before she ended with, “Dad about it.”  The silence dragged.  “So what even happened at your prom to make you hate Dad so much?”

“We got drunk, had sex and he left alone in a hotel room the next day so he could go home and tweet about how he wasn’t gay.”  He leaned back into his seat as the screen of his computer went dim.  

Jaida was biting her lower lip and looking sideways, working through her reluctance to admit she may have been wrong about something.  “Well, I mean.  That would make anyone hate a guy.”  She shifted so she was looking at him.  “So, how’d you get over something like that?”

Malik smiled.  “A lot of work.”

“Like what?” Jaida prompted.  

And he told her, all the details he could remember–as much as he thought was appropriate to share–and she sat and listened with horror and amusement until he was done.

–

Altair hadn’t even made it down the hall toward the kitchen, still wearing his businessman’s suit, when Jaida stopped in in place with her tablet held out in front of her.  The Sett hadn’t fared well in the intervening years of the internet, it’s colors were faded and the coding left it looking dated like a black and white movie, but it was recognizable never the less.  His eyes skimmed across the words at the top, settled on ‘prom’ and he groaned.  “Can I get food first?”

“So Father told me that you were a bigoted piece of trash hiding behind your fame and your money.  He said that you were twenty years old at prom and he was only seventeen.”

This conversation was going to end nowhere good.

“I didn’t know he was seventeen.”

“I don’t think that matters,” Jaida said.  She dropped the tablet away from his face and put her hands on her hip.  Time should have made her look less like her grandmother but every birthday that passed made her more-and-more like a Lamah clone, every aspect of her face a near-perfect replication.  And while he knew very well what Lamah looked like when she thought he was an ass, it was a strange reminder of years past to see that look on his daughter’s face.  

“I think it should matter a little.”

“I think you should trust me,” she said.  Her arms folded across her chest.  “I mean, if you can be as unbelievably terrible as you were and still end up with a great life, I don’t understand why I can’t be allowed to make choices that might be viewed as ludicrous mistakes by my children.”

And then it made sense.  “You want to date that stupid kid,” he said. 

“He has a name!”

“He’s eighteen!” Altair shouted back.  

“You had sex with eight hundred people,” Jaida said.  Then her eyebrow lifted up and she waited for his retort.  Her jaw was set grimly in place while he cycled through a series of emotions (respect for her investigative skills, anger at the intrusion on his past, disbelief that this conversation existed, horror at the thought of some asshole like him getting near his daughter) before he put his hands up in the air as surrender.

“You’re failing French,” he said.

“Yes and Father would keep me from dating because of it, but you don’t want me dating him because he’s a boy like you were, and he only has one thing on his mind just like you did.”  She cocked her hip out and put her hand on it, “so are you locking Tazim, Darim and Sef up in the basement when they’re sixteen?  They’re boys, they only have one thing on their mind.”

Altair sighed.  “I don’t like the boy.”

“Grandma hated you,” she countered.  “But she had actual proof.”

“I don’t want someone doing to you what I did to your Father,” he said.

“Well they can’t,” she said, “because I don’t have an eating disorder, I’m not confused by my sexuality and I’m pretty sure if some guy that’s too old to be at prom gets drunk with me that Vincenzio or Haytham would murder them before I got around to making a blog about it.”  She huffed as she said it like the potential murder of her suitors was an inconvenience.  “Not to mention,” she added far too quickly to interrupt, “I have never kept secrets from you!  I’m not an orphan with unlimited money and no responsibility!  I’m in the top five percent of my class!  I volunteer, I have a job and a savings account.  I’m well-adjusted because I have overly-concerned parents who made sure I had a well-rounded childhood.  And the one time that I really needed you, I came to you and I told you that those kids at school were making fun of me all the time because i had a lesbian mother and gay dads and you were there for me.  And I just don’t understand why you don’t think that if some stupid boy did to me what you did to Father, I wouldn’t come to you.”

“Because its different when its a boy,” Altair said.  Then he sighed, “I do trust you.  I don’t trust him.  I don’t want you anywhere near boys like that.”

“I deserve to make that choice,” she said.  “Grandma let Father make that choice.  That worked out for everyone as far as I’m concerned.”

There was no arguing with that logic.  Altair sighed again, “Malik still won’t let you date while you’re failing French.”  But more importantly, “Just be smart, Jaida.  Make the right choices for the right reasons.  This all,” he motioned at the whole house and the space between them and the tablet, “turned out well but it shouldn’t have.  It should have been a disaster.”

Jaida rolled her eyes, “I spent three hours reading Father denounce and mock and belittle every aspect of you as a person, I’m pretty sure that it was a disaster.”  But her face softened, “but I’ll remember everything you taught me.  So trust me?”

“Fine,” he said.  “As soon as you stop failing French.”

“Good, so I’ll have Mr. Gillis send you a letter home tomorrow saying I turned in all my missing assignments and then I can go on a date this weekend, right?”  She was glowing with pride.

Altair laughed because there was simply no better reaction to her conniving.  He shook his head the whole time she beamed in pride.  “Oh–” was drawn out in a long breath, “no,” stopped short, “as soon as your Father finds out you were failing on purpose because it was a tactic to get you permission to date some stupid senior boy you’ll be lucky to be allowed out of the house to attend school much less go on a date.”  He slung his arm around her shoulders as she frowned.  

“Ok, but in two weeks?” she asked.

“Sure, we’ll be optimistic.  Maybe one of the boys will do something to make you look good.”

“Oh!” Jaida said suddenly, “Peyton got caught smoking at school but she hasn’t told Uncle Desmond or Aunt Lucy yet.  Maybe he finds out about that and is thankful his child is too smart to try something so stupid and dangerous.”

Altair snorted, “you are exactly like your father.  Exactly.”  He dragged her with him down the hall and toward the kitchen for dinner.