#sometimes i think of how mean she was and i mean like.. literally would say and do the things she complained about her mom doing to her

[brehaaorgana]

idk i get that they're editorializing a bit with saying that the student never recognizes the broader symbolism of the fog -- but also, I think they're right. It's fine to say "there's fog everywhere" because sure, that's a simplified understanding of what is going on.

But is it really that much editorializing? Like the whole fog thing isn't...a secret.

This part:

No word was said about extracting the symbolism. Sometimes the fog is just blue; or at any rate, if you're literally asked to give the color of the fog in plain language, then "blue" is a much better translation of "cerulean" than "the color of the heavens", which includes the symbolism, would be.

doesn't align with the actual text itself. it's not that THOSE sentences, specifically, would require a symbolic interpretation. it's fine she said "there's fog everywhere."

but the failure to understand the symbolism later in the text starts with the failure to understand the purpose of the setting and how it's described. yeah, it's london, there's fog everywhere, up and down the river and on the docks and the center of all the terrible rawness, muddiness, and fogginess -- is Lincoln Inn's Hall, the High Court of Chancery. because it's stated that NONE of all that fog everywhere can come close to "assort with the groping and floundering condition" the high court of chancery holds.

and that's a really plain connection to make. it's not like "blue" vs "cerulean" vs "the color of the heavens at all."

This is what they mean she didn't understand later:

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth.

the fact is that dickens was writing a ridiculously long metaphor that went up and down the thames describing how foggy and muddy and horrible everything is for ages, and then he goes "and the VERY CENTER OF ALL THIS FOGINESS IS THE CHANCERY COURT," and "NONE OF THOSE OTHER THICK FOGS OR DEEP MIRES IN ALL OF LONDON COMES CLOSE TO THIS CHANCERY COURT'S MIRE AND FOG, THAT'S HOW BAD THIS IS."

like if you only kind of understand it's an industrial part of the city or whatever, i suppose that's fine. you're still grasping some key points. but failing to grasp that this was all building up to an ultimate symbolic statement about london that is rather plainly made by Dickens is definitely a problem.

...also it's just kinda bonkers they could use google and didn't google "temple bar, london" or "lincoln's inn hall," both of which would've gone a long way to helping the reader understand what was going on.

i appreciated this study: "They Can't Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills Of English Majors At Two Midwestern Universities"

essentially, a pair of professors set out to test their intuitive sense that students at the college level were struggling with complex text. they recruited 85 students, a mix of english majors and english education majors - so, theoretically, people focusing on literature, and people preparing to teach adolescents how to read literature - and had them read-while-summarizing the first seven paragraphs of dickens's bleak house (or as much as they made it through in the 20 minute session). they provided dictionaries and also said students could use their phones to look up whatever they wanted, including any unfamiliar words or references. they found that the majority of the students - 58%, or 49 out of the 85 students - functionally could not understand dickens at all, and only 5% - a mere 4 out of the 85 students - proved themselves proficient readers (leaving the remaining 38%, or 32 students, as what the study authors deemed "competent" students, most of whom could understand about half the literal meaning - pretty low bar for competence - although a few of whom, they note, did much better than the rest in this group if not quite well enough to be considered proficient).

what i really appreciated about this study was its qualitative descriptions of the challenges and reading behaviors of what the authors call "problematic readers" (that bottom 58%), which resonated strongly with my own experiences of students who struggle with reading. here's their blunt big picture overview of these 49 students:

The majority of these subjects could understand very little of Bleak House and did not have effective reading tactics. All had so much trouble comprehending concrete detail in consecutive clauses and phrases that they could not link the meaning of one sentence to the next. Although it was clear that these subjects did try to use various tactics while they read the passage, they were not able to use those tactics successfully. For example, 43 percent of the problematic readers tried to look up words they did not understand, but only five percent were able to look up the meaning of a word and place it back correctly into a sentence. The subjects frequently looked up a word they did not know, realized that they did not understand the sentence the word had come from, and skipped translating the sentence altogether.

the idea that they had so many trouble with every small piece of a text that they could not connect ideas on a sentence by sentence basis is very familiar to me from teaching and tutoring, as was the habit of thought seen in the example of the student who gloms on to the word "whiskers" in a sea of confusion and guesses incorrectly that a cat is present - struggling readers, in my experience, seem to use familiar nouns as stepping stones in a flood of overwhelm, hopping as best they can from one seemingly familiar image to the next. so was this observation, building off the example of a student who misses the fact that dickens is being figurative when he imagines a megalodon stalking the streets of london:

She first guesses that the dinosaur is just “bones” and then is stuck stating that the bones are “waddling, um, all up the hill” because she can see that Dickens has the dinosaur moving. Because she cannot logically tie the ideas together, she just leaves her interpretation as is and goes on to the next sentence. Like this subject, most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their literal translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors never seemed to affect them. In fact, none of the readers in this category ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results. Worse, their inability to understand figurative language was constant, even though most of the subjects had spent at least two years in literature classes that discussed figures of speech. Some could correctly identify a figure of speech, and even explain its use in a sentence, but correct responses were inconsistent and haphazard. None of the problematic readers showed any evidence that they could read recursively or fix previous errors in comprehension. They would stick to their reading tactics even if they were unhappy with the results.

i have seen this repeatedly, too - actually i was particularly taken with how similar this is to the behavior of struggling readers at much younger ages - and would summarize the hypothesis i have forged over time as: struggling readers do not expect what they read to make sense. my hypothesis for why this is the case is that their reading deficits were not attended to or remediated adequately early enough, and so, in their formative years - the early to mid elementary grades - they spent a lot of time "reading" things that did not make sense to them - in fact they spent much more time doing this than they ever did reading things that did make sense to them - and so they did not internalize a meaningful subjective sense of what it feels like to actually read things.

like, i've said this before, but the year i taught third grade i had multiple students who told me they loved reading and then when i asked them about a book they were reading revealed that they had absolutely no idea what was going on - on a really basic literal level like "didn't know who said which lines of dialogue" and "couldn't identify which things or characters given pronouns referred to" - and were as best as i could tell sort of constructing their own story along the way using these little bits of things they thought they understood. that's what "reading" was, in their heads. and they were, in the curriculum/model that we used at the private school where i taught, receiving basically no support to clarify that that was not what reading was, nor any instruction that would actually help them with what they needed to do to improve (understand sentences) - and i realized over the course of that year that the master's program that had certified me in teaching elementary school had provided me with very little understanding of how to help these kids (with perhaps the sole exception of the class i took on communications disorders, not because these kids had communications disorders but because that was the only class where we ever talked, even briefly, about things like sentence structures that students may need instruction in and practice with to comprehend independently). when it comes to the literal, basic understanding of a text, the model of reading pedagogy i was taught has about 6 million little "tools" that all boil down to telling kids who functionally can't read to try harder to read. this is not productive, in my experience and opinion, for kids whose maximum effort persistently yields confusion. but things are so dysfunctional all the way up and down the ladder that you can be a senior in college majoring in english without anyone but a pair of professors with a strong work ethic noticing that you can't actually read.

couple other notes:

obviously it's a small study but i'm not sure i see a reason to believe these are particularly outlierish results (ACT scores - an imperfect metric but not a meritless one IMO for reading specifically, where the task mostly really is to read a set of texts written for the educated layperson and answer factual questions about them - were a little bit above the national average)

the study was published last year, but the research was conducted january to april 2015. so there's no pandemic influence, no AI issue - these are millennials who now would span roughly ages 28-32 (i guess it's possible one of the four first-year students was one of the very first members of gen z lol). if you're in your late 20s or early 30s, we are talking about people your age, and whatever the culprit is here, it was happening when you were in school.

i think some people might want to blame this on NCLB but i find this unconvincing for a variety of reasons. first of all, NCLB did not pass because everyone in 2001 agreed that education was super hunky-dory; in fact, the sold a story podcast outlines how an explicit goal of NCLB was to train teachers in systematic phonics instruction, because that was not the norm when NCLB was passed, and an unfortunate outcome was that phonics became politicized in ed world. second, anyone who understands anything about reading should need about ten minutes max to spend some time on standardized test prep and recognize that if your goal is truly to maximize scores... then the vast majority of your instructional time should be spent on improving actual reading skills because you actually can't meaningfully game these tests by "practicing main idea questions" (timothy shanahan addresses this briefly near the top of this post). so i find it very difficult to believe that any school that pivoted to multiple choice drill time in an attempt to boost reading scores was teaching reading effectively pre-NCLB, because no set of competent literacy professionals would think that would work even for the goal of raising test scores. third, NCLB mandated yearly testing in grades 3-8 but only one test year in high school; kansas set its reading and math test year in high school as tenth grade. so theoretically these kids all had two years of sweet sweet freedom from NCLB in which their teachers could have done whatever the fuck they wanted to teach these kids to actually read. the fact that they didn't suggests perhaps there were other problems afoot. fourth, and maybe most saliently for this particular study, the sample text was the first seven paragraphs of a novel - in other words, the exact kind of short incomplete text that NCLB allegedly demanded excessive time spent on. i'm not really sure what universe it makes sense in that students who can't read the first seven paragraphs of a novel would have become much better reader if everything else had been the same but they had been making completely wack associations based on nonsense guesses for all 300 pages instead. (if you read the study it's really clear that for problematic readers, things go off the rails immediately, in a way that a good program targeted at teaching mastery of text of 500 words or less would have done something about.)

all but 3 of the students reported A's and B's in their english classes and, again, 69% of them are juniors and seniors, so like... i mean idk kudos to these professors for being like "hold up can these kids actually read?" but clearly something is wack at the college level too [in 2015] if you can make your way through nearly an entire english major without being able to read the first seven paragraphs of a dickens novel. (once again i really do encourage you to look at the qualitative samples in the study, lest you think i am being uncharitable by summarizing understandable misunderstandings or areas of confusion that may resolve themselves with further exposure to the text as "can't read.") not to mention the fact that most students could not what they had learned in previous or current english classes and when asked to name british and american authors and/or works of the nineteenth century, roughly half the sample at each college could name at most one.

the authors of the study are struck by the fact that students who cannot parse the first 3 sentences of bleak house feel very confident about their ability to read the entire novel, and discover that this seeming disconnect is resolved by the fact that these students seem to conceptualize "reading" as "skimming and then reading sparknotes." i think it's really tempting to Kids These Days this phenomenon (although again these are people who in some cases have now been in the workforce for a decade) and categorize it as laziness or a lack of effort, but i think that there is, as i described above, a real and sincere confusion over what "reading" is in which this makes a certain logical sense because it's not like they have some store of actual reading experiences to compare it to. i also think it's pretty obvious looking at just how wildly severed from actual textual comprehension their readings are that these are not - or at least not entirely - students who could just work harder and master the entirety of bleak house all on their own. like i don't think you get from "charles dickens is describing a bunch of dinosaur bones actually walking the streets of london" to comfortably reading nineteenth century literature by just trying harder. i really just don't (and i say that acknowledging i personally have had students who like... were good readers if i was forcing them to work at it constantly... but i have also had students, including ones getting ready to enter college, who were clearly giving me everything they had and what they had was at the present moment insufficient). i think that speaks to a missing skillset that they don't know are missing, because they don't have any other experience of "reading" to compare it to.

just wanna highlight again that although they don't give the breakdown some of these students are not just english majors but english education majors a.k.a. the high school english teachers of tomorrow. some of them may be teaching high school english right now, in case anyone wishes to consider whether "maybe some high school english teachers can't read the first seven paragraphs of bleak house?" should be kept in mind when we discuss present-day educational ills.

[butyoudidthis4what]

Teaser for No Man's Land Part 3

HELLO!

My ADHD really ADHDed and today while I was looking back for continuity purposes I read the part of No Man's Land Part 3 that I was going to use for the little teaser/spoiler and realized I totally fucking spaced actually posting it. I'm so sorry!!!

Here she is now though! I have not proofread/edited at all. If you see the West Wing reference, thank you.

I know the wait for Part 3 has been long and I'm so sorry, I am really trying to have it out sometime Tuesday night, maybe Wednesday, and then I will start Quiet Part 2. Thank you guys so much for your patience and support, it truly means the world to me and gives me so much inspiration and motivation! I promise I am working hard to get it all out!

If you haven't read Parts 1 and 2 but would like to you can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here. I will post the entire bit under the cut! I'm not going to tag since this is just a small teaser/spoiler.

I like how he looks from behind:

It comes up fairly early on, while you and Jack are both still at home and chatting about wedding stuff one night. You’re on the couch with your head in Jack’s lap, attention split between the show you put on TV, listening to Jack think out loud while he does the crossword and scrolling Pinterest.

“Four words lead to this declaration.” Jack has the crossword on the armrest of the couch, his left hand intermittently resting gently on the side of your neck, thumb brushing over your cheekbone, or on your arm. He clicks his pen in thought. Because of course he does the crossword in pen. “Three letters. Nothing filled in.” You hum in acknowledgment at him, your way of saying you’ll think.

 “Pennsylvania recognizes self-uniting marriages. We could just marry ourselves,” you suggest.

“We could, yeah.” You turn your head and look up at Jack after he says it. There’s something on his mind. “Five letter word for blowhard.”

“Storm,” you both say at the same time, share a little laugh about it. You sit up and Jack makes a little noise of discontent. 

“I’m staying right here, don’t worry,” you tell him as you curl up next to him and wrap your arms around his left upper arm. “You don’t want that.” It’s half question half sentence. You’re trying to give him the space and opportunity to say what he’s thinking about who he’d like to marry you. 

“I, no. It’s not that I don’t want that or that I wouldn’t love that.” He shakes his head.

You give him a second. “But you’d prefer something else? Someone else?” An imperceptible nod. 

“It’s going to sound stupid.” 

“I sincerely doubt that.” You give him an encouraging smile.

Jack clicks his pen a couple of times before turning to really look at you. “I was thinking, what if we asked Robby? I know he’d have to do the whole getting ordained online thing, but…” Jack trails off for a second. “He just, before you, before I had you, Michael saved my life more than once. Metaphorically speaking. And he’s saved your life. Literally. And he’s my best friend and I don’t know. It just felt like maybe it was right.”

A slow smile pulls up on your face, all gooey and in love. “I think that feels perfect.”

“Really?” Jack raises his eyebrows at you. He’s not really shocked per se, it’s just one of those moments where it falls out of his mouth. 

“Really.” You nod. “I know how much he means to you. He means a lot to me too. You know the whole saving my life thing.” You lean in and give Jack a kiss on the cheek. 

“Okay,” Jack nods with you. “We’ll have to find a time to ask him, decide how I guess.”

“I have confidence that we will figure it out. We have time.” You squeeze Jack’s arm and then pull away, start to go back to the position you were in. 

“I do,” you say as you settle your head back on Jack’s lap.  

“A little premature, but I love to hear it.” Jack smirks at you as you look up at him. 

“The crossword clue.” You playfully roll your eyes at him. “Four words lead to this declaration. The answer is I do. The four words are ‘will you marry me.’”

You end up deciding to do it at the Pitt one day. 

You considered planning it and asking to do dinner and make it a thing but that all felt a little too formal and almost pretentious. It didn’t fit. Doing it on the fly while he was working felt right. 

“Can we talk to you?” Jack asks Robby, you standing next to him holding his hand. Jack just finished his day shift at eleven thirty in the evening, had you come to the hospital around seven just in case he got off on time. You chilled in the break room the last four and half or so hours, chatting with people as they came and went. 

Robby looks between the two of you. “This feels ominous.” 

“Yes or no question Michael.” Jack deadpans. 

“Jack!” You chide him a little, but your smirk belies you.

“I’m sorry,” Jack mutters, “can we please talk to you?”

Robby rolls his eyes at Jack calling him by his real name. “Yes. I suppose you can.” 

“Thanks Robby!” You smile at him. 

Robby thinks it’s odd. You seem almost nervous and so does Jack, but Jack is harder to read at the moment. The shift he just finished was the last on his run and he didn’t get off within four hours of when he was supposed to a single one of those three shifts. Plus this shift was particularly trying. Between all of that and him still adjusting to being back he’s exhausted. It makes him even harder than usual to read.

“In here,” Jack nods, opens the door to the family room. 

“Okay, you guys are kind of freaking me out because this is ominous and now you’re taking me into a room where we tell family members their loved ones have died.” 

“It’s not bad, I promise.” You try to smile at him reassuringly. Robby nods at you like he doesn’t quite believe you as he sits down in one of the chairs, you and Jack taking the two across from him. 

“So.” You clear your throat. “Obviously you know we’re getting married.” You hold up your left hand and flash the ring at him, which pulls a little smile from Robby. 

“Robby,” Jack starts. But he stops. He looks emotional, like this is a hard conversation to have but not because it’s bad but because it means something. Jack takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Michael,” he starts again, earning a slight eyebrow raise from Robby because of the tone, “we were wondering if you would consider getting ordained and officiating our wedding. If you, if you’d marry us?”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I hope you enjoyed, and hope you will enjoy reading the full Part 3 once it is up!!

The blowhard and storm crossword clue and answer are from the West Wing.

Interact with this post to get on my Jack tag list!

[o-uncle-newt]

The Incredible Shrinking Wimsey

As alluded to in my previous post from earlier today...

Okay, so there is a pretty common thing you see from people, whether they like Gaudy Night or hate it, which is this idea that Sayers made Wimsey taller and/or hotter over time- as, some say, she fell more and deeper in love with him. The "hotter" I think is debatable, though I fall on the side of not- IMO his actual physical description remains very consistent over time, with him being described as having a "high beaked profile" as late as Busman's Honeymoon, and his personal character traits/manners and wealth/title/intelligence do a lot of work for him in terms of attractiveness to women. (The strongest counterargument to this point is probably Murder Must Advertise in which he's somehow crazy attractive to multiple women while undercover- presumably that's a combination of the manners, intelligence, and... macho pond diving ability? Not really my favorite Sayers book tbh. We'll get back to it.)

But it's VERY easy to refute the "taller" allegation, and in fact when you try to you notice something weird- that Wimsey may arguably get SHORTER over the course of the books and then yoyo back.

Do we care about continuity?

Sayers and continuity, I will say, is weird. I love how she remembers incredibly clearly that she had Abrahams the cartoonishly Jewish jeweler show Wimsey a ruby engagement ring in an earlier short story and has Abrahams sell him that very ring in Busman's Honeymoon (in fact I love it enough that I wrote a missing scene fic about it). I also perversely love how she has Harriet de-age by about three years for literally no reason and how, to make the scenario for Busman's Honeymoon work, she transfers her upbringing from the city (as made clear in Have His Carcase) to the country. It's like she cares more about some things than others, and the things she cares about are the vibes. I respect that, because her vibes are generally impeccable.

And that's why I think that it's actually pretty important that Sayers may actually shrink Wimsey to make a point, and important to point out to people that she very much does not make him taller, certainly not in a bid to emphasize his attractiveness. So let's go through the known stats (and if I'm missing anything, please comment to add!):

A) When you google "Lord Peter Wimsey height" you get that he is of "average height." I refuse to word search all the books until I find the exact reference for this but I don't doubt it's there somewhere.

B) In Whose Body?, Wimsey is described as "rather a small man, but not undersized," in comparison to if he'd been "six foot three." Vague but definitely he's not meant to be tall per se.

C) In Clouds of Witness, as Wimsey and Parker are trying to figure out whether "No. 10" could have gotten over the wall, Wimsey says that he's five foot nine. This is unambiguous- he says it straight out. (Parker, in contrast, is six feet.)

D) In Murder Must Advertise, Wimsey is stated to be too short to be a Metropolitan Police officer. This is VERY often pulled out as an example of how short he is, but the real question is what it actually means. In doing some online searching, I got anywhere between 5'7 and 5'10 as the potential required height (with 5'10 being the height as listed in the Lord Peter Wimsey Companion). HOWEVER, I believe that the required height at the time would be somewhere between 5'8 and 5'9, as expressed in this Parliamentary record. If someone can find a better reference point, please share! But in the meantime it would seem that Wimsey may be shorter than 5'9, his previously listed height in Clouds of Witness.

E) Gaudy Night is a FASCINATING one, so I'm going to divide it into two parts. One is the part that people tend to pull out, in my opinion wrongly, to indicate that Wimsey got taller. The other is the part that makes me even more convinced that Sayers shrank him.

E1) It's sometimes said that Wimsey clearly got taller because Harriet "can see him in a crowd." Let me pull out the quote:

Scanning those sacred precincts, therefore, from without the pale, Harriet became aware that the local colour included a pair of slim shoulders tailored to swooning-point and carrying a well-known parrot profile, thrown into prominence by the acute backward slant of a pale-grey topper. A froth of summer hats billowed about this apparition, so that it resembled a slightly grotesque but expensive orchid in a bouquet of roses.

Nothing about him being tall and visible, just about his hat being tall and visible and his face being seen underneath it! And he may well be taller than the women he's surrounded by, but at anywhere between 5'7 and 5'9 (as established above) he most likely would be, given that men tend to be taller than women- which we'll return to below. There is no indication from here that Wimsey is meant to be shown as tall.

E2) More tellingly, there's the famous line closer to the end of the book:

"Bless the man, if he hasn't taken my gown instead of his own! Oh, well, it doesn't matter. We're much of a height and mine's pretty wide on the shoulders, so it's exactly the same thing."

I can't easily find the average height of an English woman in the 1930s, but after reading a bunch of different sites and articles and such and extrapolating, I get a general impression of between 5'1 and 5'4. For context, the average height of an English woman now is apparently 5'3-5'4, and while immigration from developing countries may affect that, average heights worldwide still seem to have overall increased since the start of the 20th century, if not necessarily by massive margins. These days, the countries that have the tallest average height for women have it at about 5'6/5'7, as far as I can tell.

We don't get a tremendous amount of vital statistics about Harriet Vane. Wimsey describes her as "long limbed" in Busman's Honeymoon, which presumably implies tall (though could also just say something about her proportions), but at the same time she is never, to my knowledge, remarked upon by any other character to be of any kind of exceptional height. This is subjective, of course, but from experience (as a shortie whose sister is six inches taller), once a woman is about 5'9 people start making comments, so let's assume that she's tallish but not notably Tall. 5'7 or 5'8 would work at the upper end of that, which is the height we established from Murder Must Advertise for Wimsey, as it happens!

Obviously, Harriet may not be EXACTLY the same height as Wimsey- but we know that she can't be that much shorter from the above quote. Here's an indication, though, that she may even be shorter than 5'7- the fact that she's around the same height as Annie, who is described as of medium height. We deduce this from two places at least- Lord Saint George says that the woman he saw at Shrewsbury is "about your height or a bit less" to Harriet, and Miss Pyke observes that the dress on the dummy is for a woman of "medium height." While as Gherkins notes Annie may be a bit shorter than Harriet, "medium height" in the context of women's clothing would, given height tendencies, be shorter than "medium height" for a man like Wimsey. So even if Harriet is taller than Annie, and relatively tall for a woman, for her to be both "medium height" and about the same height as Wimsey he'd have to be on the short side.

And, finally,

F) In Busman's Honeymoon, we're told that "[Wimsey's] height was a sensitive point with him" and then that he is... five foot nine. Just the same as he'd been in Clouds of Witness.

All this to say- it seems pretty clear to me that Wimsey starts off about 5'9, a perfectly respectable male height, and either stays that way or gets even shorter, depending on how you look at it. 5'9 a perfectly respectable male height while not being considered tall per se, at least in Europe. Wimsey also (as he's often described) being very slim would contribute perhaps to him seeming a bit smaller than he is.

So why does Wimsey shrink? I like to think that I've made the case for it that he does, and the reason why I emphasize it (rather than, as in my previous post, just yelling about him not growing) is because it's hard not to imagine that she very much did it to make a point.

Murder Must Advertise, as alluded to above, I think is partly a function of a certain kind of action-novel laziness rather than a statement about Wimsey as a person, to be honest. "Death Bredon" is a rogue, and rogues have women fall for them and use it. By showing that Wimsey is able to attract so many women as Death Bredon, without the advantages of name, title, money, and manners (or at least, his usual kind of manners), and also without height, Sayers conveys his charm. Again, I don't find it particularly convincing, but I do find it interesting that much of the charm and mystery that gets Dian de Momerie, at least, interested in "Death Bredon" is based on his athleticism and nimbleness, which actually are helped by his comparatively small and slim stature. A taller man may not have managed that dive into a pond in the same way...

Gaudy Night... well, I mean, that's the one that is basically all narrated by Harriet, who is falling/has fallen in love with Wimsey. She's naturally going to be biased, and her biases and blind spots are basically the structure around which the book is constructed. The whole book is constructed around how Harriet sees Wimsey, and so the fact that they are the same height, that Wimsey is significantly shorter (for example) than Reggie Pomfret, that Wimsey's self defense classes with Harriet focus on skill and using the other person's strength to compensate for being small yourself, that Wimsey get Harriet to accept his proposal by putting his head down and making himself smaller... the whole book is about Harriet seeing Wimsey as equal to her so him being specifically physically small relative to other men in a way that will not overpower her is very relevant. (In marked contrast, incidentally, to AS Byatt's Possession, about which I've written a long screed about how much I hate its approach to male/female dynamics as relate, among other things, to size.)

All of this is less important to be spelled out in Busman's Honeymoon, at which point they're married already and Harriet feels good about it, all things being equal. So Wimsey can safely go back to being 5'9 again. As, indeed, he pretty much always was.

[zoyaspoetry]

I know that you guys could be surprised cuz last few posts were about Halsey. Ah, i knew that this moment will come here one day and basically i should explain why i like her so fking much.

I'm gonna do this in 2 versions - polish and english cuz i know that i have both types of readers here. ;-)

There we go - english at first (polish later, after my shift at work).

I was 19 when I discovered Halsey here on Tumblr. I was 19 and depressed, so Tumblr was some kind of med for me. First her song - Young God, which i reconized cuz of this post. I was looking for a new music anyway, so maybe that was a sign, huh? It was something new, something magic... And i was like "wtf, it can't be true, why is she so fking great?" - i swear, i was shocked for next few days. Finally i found someone who understands me in 100%. This is how i discovered BADLANDS - her 1st album. Now i just feel tears in my eyes, cuz i didn't expect then that her music is gonna save my life... like 665734 times. She was first person, who understands what i had in my head and what i wanted to say. Do you know how is it when you don't understand yourself, when people around you don't understand you and then you discovered artist, who FINALLY KNOWS WHAT DID YOU MEAN? I was devastated. Her music shocked me at first and broke me into small, tiny pieces. So many memories i have in my head right now. I posted a video from her yesterday's concert where she's singing "Drive" and i just felt like Im 21 again and all what i can see is colorful sky, 5 a.m, and my ex-boyfriend sitting with me in his car and we are sooo tired, happy, even when Im manic again and Im gonna break him. This song is about him, i swear. It's about every fking moment, when we were drinking raspberry tea, smoking cigarettes at 3 a.m, talking and laughing. I think BADLANDS changed something in me. This is one of my favorite albums EVER. All of this is about my roots. About being a Tumblr princess, colorful hair, glitter, tiny dresses, heavy shoes (I should focus on my job right now, but all what i can do is being crushed cuz i feel like 19 again).

Halsey is a great lyrics creator. Her words every fking time resonate with me (maybe cuz she's bipolar as well, which i realized few years later). Sometimes she's just singing something what i can't even describe. She's brave and in simply way saying everything what i wanted to say, but sometimes i just couldn't. Today, almost 10 years later, I can't imagine what could happen with me without her music. I'm so grateful that i could discover her music. This is one of many good things Tumblr gave me.

I believe that one day I'll meet her at her concert and I'll be able to say how grateful I'm. She was my support in almost every moment of my adult life. When i was broken, depressed, crazy, insane. When love sucked for me, when i felt misunderstood, when i needed power and being sure that i'm doing right things. Even when i didn't understand myself. SHE LITERALLY SAVED MY LIFE. When i was sure I'm gonna die soon, i just listened her music and i was better.

This is one of the most personal thing in my life, more personal than things i did when i was manic. I wish that everyone can discover her music and her as a person. Everyone should be grateful cuz without her... I would be fking dead long time ago.

(polish version later, so stay tuned and sorry for my being emotional lol)

Thank you @tiredandlonelymuse for everything. You're my queen since you started your music adventure and it's not gonna change, like never. You have saved many, many lives. Mine as well.

hold me down x roman holiday x young god

halsey + swimming pools

do not remove caption

[yandere-fics]

Miriel Stonewood

♡ "Baaabe, please I'm sorry I hit her. Please forgive meee, then we can go home and cuddle!" ♡

She's a delusional crybaby who prefers to go the manipulation route, not that she's incapable of violence but it takes away time she could spend with her mate plus she's a nepo baby so why would she do hard stuff when she can use her connection to ruin other peoples lives. She will still get into fights sometimes though. If her darling isn't paying enough attention to her she's whine and scream and cry at their feet until they tell her that they love her too but she's quick to forgive you if you show her a bit of attention. She believes her darling loves her like she loves them so if they say otherwise they're just being excessively cruel to her, or someone put them up to it.

♡ "Babe, it's mean to pretend you don't know my nameeee… Miriel Stonewood! My village was a bit small so personal last names aren't necessary but if you wanttt I'll take your last name when we get married!" ♡

Her village is on the smaller side but is considered one of the more powerful elf villages apart from the ones literally run by the elf gods, those are in their own league. Hers is still on par with them despite their small size so if they got just a few more elves they'd probably dominate that area. Elves rarely have children though because elf children take a very long time to age, no one wants to raise an infant for more than half a decade. Least of all Miriel because she actively does not want kids.

♡ "How old am I? Elves age a little bit different than humans babe so I'm 123, which based on your age would be roughly 20! Don't worry though, I won't outlive you or anything if that's what you were worried about!" ♡

Forest elves take roughly 6 years for every human year of growth and are released to see the world at 150ish but due to Miriel being the daughter of what is essentially the king of her village, she was let out early since she'll have to return home and be queen at some point. Out of the village her aging is speed up ever so slightly but even then it's not by much because she's a very healthy elf. Humans upon meeting their mate often take on their aging property as well so if an old human met their mate who was only supposed to live five more years, they'd probably squeeze at least three more decades even without their mate having anything on top of that to keep them alive even further.

♡ "Babe please don't ask me about other crushes, you know elves only wait for their mates!" ♡

Miriel has never felt attracted to anyone outside of her mate because from a young age she knew roughly who her mate would be, of course she has found other women pretty when she was much younger but she mostly got used to the elves around her and they started to seem somewhat natural to her, now she only really find her mate attractive in the slightest.

♡ "Babe, I really don't want to talk about work, it's so annoying and my boss is so mean. I'm getting tired of these questions, can't we just cuddle and talk about something more pleasant? I really don't want to get upset with my mate!" ♡

She's an envoy and diplomat for her village, she works for the boss's migration sect of the company and helps elves settle in to the city and helps make sure they can find and claim their mate which can be very tedious work when she also has to make sure to write down which people now owe the boss a favor and how big that favor is. Her village also isn't accessible unless invited in so sometimes she has to return home to inform them of things. She mostly remains in the city though. She's very good at her job despite how lazy she is with it.

♡ "What do I like? Obviously you, babe. What else could I be interested in, you're my soulmate, I waited my whole life for you. Uhm besides that, humans are so gullible sometimes, it's funny." ♡

She doesn't have a whole lot of hobbies besides shopping and thinking about her mate. She likes you a lot and she likes when she punches someone and it draws just a little bit of blood, if the first punch doesn't make them bleed then she'll just have to do it again.

♡ "I hate my jobbb… it takes me away from you too much. It's so unfair, the boss must not have her on soulmate cause if she did then she'd know how hard it is to be pulled away from you!" ♡

She doesn't like how you haven't fully fallen for her or accepted that you're hers, she'd like to be able to drag you back to her village with her but that's difficult when you do mean things like make friends or spend time away from her.

♡ "Oh uhm, well I guess if I have to say one ability I have, it would be how good I am at loving you but that's to be expected honestly babe." ♡

Most of her talents just seem natural and unimportant to her. She's above average with a knife and fights in general but not easily able to kill people, she knows a lot of things about the forest and nature, she grows plants in her apartment cause she feels like she'll die if there's not some greenery and she's pretty decent with poisons and dosing people. She isn't likely to drug her darling but she could if she had the incentive.

♡ "I love you so much babe, I'm so glad you're mine, now please forgive me so we can go cuddle." ♡

[boilingcowboy]

my take on the judo flip thing because uhhh yes i know this is a kids book but i still wanna talk about it so deal with it.

BECAUSE OKAY listen the hole „omg annabeth is so toxic she’s so abusive“ thing is not getting old it is old

and honestly i do not think that some people understand the different layers that that scene has and by that scene i mean the hole reunion scene not just the judo flip

(i should be color coding this but ehh who cares) and also obviously everyone interprets things differently bla bla bla the stuff

but i do think that this scene has a multitude of layers that especially make sense when you take into account that at that time percabeth had spent more time being friends than being a couple and that plays deeply into why the judo happened

because yes you have the reunion of them as a couple where they kiss and embrace which you would expect cus yk they’re together they haven’t seen each other in months and it was all sort of tragic and it’s just what you would expect from a couple

but also to them percabeth as a whole the kissing and embracing openly in front of people and generally just being a couple to them that’s still new-ish, it’s still a bit unfamiliar, it’s not how they have been in public for most of their time knowing each other. yes i know they kissed and embraced in front of people before that but largely that was after the battle of manhattan before that a lot of scenes of them kissing is in private even hugs are mostly in private.

basically what i am trying to say is that because they didn’t get the time to get used to being a couple in public and getting comfortable with that and familiar before percy got stolen the hole display of the reunion didn’t 100% register nor prove to honestly both parties that they fully got the relationship they had before back.

which is where the judo flip comes in.

because before being a couple you know what percy and annabeth were ?? yeah best friends. best friends who for YEARS routinely fought, trained and worked with each other.

Honestly the hole judo flip and then the „if you do this ever again i swear to gods“ thing is the most them publicly that they know because for a good majority in public they’re like that they were like that since day one!! they were at each other’s throats since day one!!! this is what’s familiar to them both!! And the fact that both of their reactions to the judo flip are relief/calmness (annabeth) and laughter/i know what she means by this (percy) just proves that. And yes they were still at each other’s throats in all of the books sometimes good natured sometimes not but especially publicly they were like that.

Also the reason i keep saying publicly publicly all the time is because they behaved differently in public/around other people vs in private and it’s pretty noticeable and it also in my opinion affects how familiar certain actions feel to them both in public and in private. (while yes there is the hole phrase of „oh nothing else matterd no one else mattered“ sometimes subconsciously it still does!!)

so to get back to my layers i think the two different embraces where the two different stages percabeth has because yes they’re now a couple but before that they were friends and a lot of times the „oh they were literally best friends before this“ comes out to show and play into their dynamic

okay yay done this probably doesn’t make sense but i need the thoughts out of my head so take it and i might rewrite this when i can coherently make sense of this…or not who knows i don’t it’s really late rn

pretty sure i lost the plot two sentences in but ehhhh

also if you see pervy instead of percy that’s a typo!!

[truecorvid]

shorted on my paycheck AGAIN (second time this year at least) because somehow my request to be paid for the days i was out sick wasn't processed correctly. or some shit

[linabirb]

so sorry another oc post

greetings miki andou from a hit ocgram project called linagram. your main motivation as a character is to save your younger sibling from The Horrors and you do not care about what happens to you at all. honestly, if there was a way for you to sacrifice yourself for marito/asahi you most likely would. even though you really do have good intentions, your actions almost always have the worst consequences you can imagine, and even if you forgive people and choose to ignore their flaws, you only end up making them or the lives of other people worse. you're obsessed with saving everyone, guiding them, protecting them, controlling them, you will force other guards to forgive the prisoners you want to be saved if needed and maybe abusing the power you have really is the only way to save people sometimes. at least that's what you believe. prisoners either love you or hate you, some of them see you as their savior, some of them see you as extremely manipulative. you can be called "the goddess of milgram" even, honestly, you probably could become one, if it wasn't for the fact that milgram's real goddess is watching you right now.

now, may i ask you which character from a certain gacha game you kin. to be more specific, that gacha game has a turn-based combat system. to be even more specific, that game has the word "rail" in its title

[cheekblush]

SCREAM there are rumors being spread about me at work that i have smth going on with a colleague of mine 😭😭😭😭

[britneyshakespeare]

Nothing I love more than having a little tea w the office ladies

[crossbackpoke-check]

about to be sooo nosy so. my apologies. but. morgan frost? girlfriend? do share (or don’t! again this is so nosy i’m sorry)

for legal purposes i can neither confirm nor deny anything about morgan and his girlfriend but afaik i think he’s single right now? at one point (within the past four years 😭) he did for sure have a girlfriend and that is the extent of my wag knowledge

[heroesriseandfall]

Cass is not a human lie detector…

[phagodyke]

i keep getting irrationally miffed at ppl 😐😐

[doctorwillsolace]

in a crappy mood and being super blunt with my boss bc of it

[drvwing]

20s are destined for hard lessons

[grandwretch]

if winds of winter comes out and Sansa and Jon's friendship was a TV show hallucination idk what I'll do. set myself on fire? drown in a lake?