#the fact that i'm even worried about that is probably a sign that i'm misusing this medium

[holeynightsky]

overthinking albums: midnights 3am expansion pack

hello friends, and welcome to part three of me making the entire midnights album about RWBY characters and ships! today, we'll address the songs from midnights (3am edition) by taylor swift. this is part three of this series, so be sure to check out parts 1 and 2!

with that said, let's jump right in!

14. the great war - once again, we begin with a bumbleby song. what can i say, i'm weak and this is *perfect* for their gradual trust building in vol 6/7/8. you drew up some good faith treaties / i drew curtains closed could go in either direction, depending on which part of their arc you're in. and maybe it's the past that's talking / screaming from the crypt is adam haunting them through vol 6. and the repetition of hand-holding imagery? my hand was the one you reached for, but every time the line occurs, we cut to a different scene where that matters: lying on the ground post-adam vol3, standing in the classroom during the trauma dump vol2, dancing in the atlas dorms getting ready for a night out. and don't get me started on the whole somewhere in the haze / got the sense i'd been betrayed verse--if that doesn't scream their fractured dynamic through vol5 and 6, i don't know what does. we've burned for better / i vowed i would always be yours.

15. bigger than the whole sky - okay this is gonna sound a bit out there because we know so little about her, but stick with me: a song for summer rose, dying in battle somewhere in remnant, thinking about never getting to see her little girls grow up. i'm never gonna meet / what could've been, would've been / what should've been you. for bonus points, and to align with i've got a lot to live about, this can be for both summer and raven--leaving in different ways, with different degrees of choice, but leaving nonetheless, thinking about how they will never see what becomes of their children. every single thing to come / has turned into ashes.

16. paris - another bumbleby song, because i'm shameless and obsessed. specifically, this is yang/blake from @thirteenyasmin 's rockstar/hollywood au fic, let you see my wilder side, which has been one of my all-time favorites for years now so if you haven't read it please go do that immediately. i'm so in love that i might stop breathing is that exact dynamic, and they are absolutely so wrapped up in each other that they pay no attention to the outside world. ksdjfhaslkj i have to move on or i'll start crying because they deserve. so. much.

17. high infidelity - this one's for team STRQ as a whole, because i am absolutely certain that every non-sibiling member of that team has had a romantic/sexual relationship at some point. so this song, at various points, could be any member singing about any member--put on your records / and regret meeting me / ... / put on your headphones / and burn my city. i don't even have to go into i didn't know you were keeping count, that's so obvious from literally everything qrow does and says and implies about his old team. or tai and summer and raven, all tangled up, and you know there's many different ways that you can kill the one you love / the slowest way is never loving them enough. and the slow-dawning horror of storm coming / good husband / bad omen / dragged my feet right down the aisle, over shots of summer fighting on a desolate farm road, raven turning away, tai and yang in the kitchen at night. ugh, absolute chills.

.18. glitch - i actually think this is a salem/ozma song! i mean, come on--a romance that was never meant to be, fast-growing love, the breathless wonder at it all? i was supposed to sweat you out / in search of glorious happenings of happenstance on someone else's playground? that's so salem, i cannot even believe it. and i'm not even sorry / nights are so starry, blood moonlit. beautiful romance and ominous foreshadowing. 10/10 fits with their whole messy situation.

.19. would've could've should've - winter schnee. i'll say it again, louder: *winter schnee*. oh my god is this winter at the end of vol8 singing to ironwood. i'm having trouble isolating lines because that's how much of this fits. if you'd never looked my way / i would've stayed / on my knees / and i damn sure never would've danced with the devil / at nineteen, and the god's honest truth is that the pain was heaven is her breaking out of that toxic mansion, joining the atlas military, finally existing out of that space. but then you hit the second-guessing as ironwood spirals into paranoia: and now that i'm grown / i'm scared of ghosts / memories feel like weapons. or, or, or! you're a crisis of my faith, watching her turn her back on everything she's dedicated her life to for years? the tomb won't close / stained-glass windows in my mind, looking at the trauma her siblings have? asdfksjdhfkla please put me out of my misery, i'm so emotional thinking about this.

.20. dear reader - i've thought about this one a lot, and i keep circling back to ozma/oz/oscar (oz, for the sake of this post). watching his slow progression through time, trying to escape his past: desert all your past lives / and if you don't recognize yourself / that means you did it right. his eons-long fight against salem: the greatest of luxuries is your secrets / dear reader / when you aim at the devil / make sure you don't miss. the lives he spent hiding away from that fight, crushed by the weight of it all: i prefer hiding in plain sight / my fourth drink in hand / these desperate prayers of a cursed man. and throughout it all, the plea at the root of it, the why-is-this-my-problem, the please-let-it-end: never take advice from someone who's falling apart.

and that, at last, concludes overthinking albums: midnights! thank you if you read that absolute insane amount of text. and even if you didn't, hey, i hope you're having a great time regardless. really, i just hope everyone is hanging in there in this roller-coaster world

[levinletlive]

I've always wanted to learn and to share. I've always wanted to go to college and become an expert in something I could use to help my family, friends, and community. It feels vain to just say it myself, but I'm pretty intelligent. That's probably why I'm so depressed all the time, in spite of all the medications and therapy I'vegone through.

Today was a bad day. I have a list of over 50 drafts of articles that I want to write based on things I learned, care about, and thought might help or at least entertain others.

I don't know why I think that would be a useful way to spend my time. I don't have a college degree or any certifications in anything. I'm not an expert on anything except my own experience. Even then, I have a hard time figuring out what things I believe based on facts and what I believe based on my feelings. Everything I write makes me feel like a fraud and a lightningrod for punishment and abuse.

Without any formal training, I struggle to find articles and studies that are relevant to the things I want to talk about. Even when I find them, I struggle to concentrate and parse through the horrible vocabulary salads that scientists and scholars vomit up on Elsevier. Sometimes even the abstracts and the conclusions are so full of technical jargon that it feels like they were written in a dead language.

"Just Google it!" People say, but they don't tell you what to do after that. They don't tell you how to separate lengthy phrases and terms without losing your understanding before you've grasped the concept. They don't tell you what a good sample size looks like, or how to tell when something that seems logical isn't really.

I wouldn't even mind teaching myself, if all of my time wasn't monopolized by work and doctor's appointments. I became so frustrated trying to write an article about the misuse of the phrase "live within your means" in response to rapid inflation of the cost of basic necessities that I wanted to cry. Then I became frustrated, and all I could think about was how good it would feel to go swimming.

Then I became angry. I started to think about all of the simple pleasures of life that are increasingly paywalled due to privatized ownership and fees. Fees for parking, membership fees, sign up fees, reservation fees, maintenance fees, annual fees, etc. National parks used to be a free way to have quality time with nature, and now it would cost so much money in gas and fees that I would have to give up food for a week to go. A gym membership would cost me almost the same.

I'm mad. I'm pissed off that educational institutions paywall knowledge and access to high-paying jobs by charging exorbitant tuition fees and then charging up the ass for certifications to prove that you can do the job better than a monkey so employers won't have to give you any on-the-job training. I'm pissed that there are jobs that don't pay enough to cover our basic needs. I am enraged that the upper classes are rushing to lock us out of every good experience, and more quickly all the time.

Above all, I'm exhausted. It's a challenge to find reasons to keep getting up in the morning and trying to do what's necessary just to barely eke by.

I love my job, but I hate my circumstances. I just keep thinking, what would my life be like if my time was my own? What if I could just take days off without having to worry about losing access to water, shelter, and food? I want to work with people. I want a hobby that educates and entertains people. I want to write and read about subjects of passion. I want to go outside of my fucking county without starving myself at home.

And I make good money! Or, I used to. I make $26/hr, but even before I had to go out on disability (because I literally wanted to unalive) I was barely making ends meet. Now my checks are 30% smaller and my rent went up 20% last December. I have such a tiny, desperate support system because we're all carrying generational trauma that prevented our families from developing any financial stability. Now it's too late. With the rate of inflation being what it is, I just feel like I'm circling the drain. I look at the homeless camps by the riverside and see my future.

When I reach out to others to try to find a way to do something about the situation, they always just tell me to go start a fucking revolution myself. As if any one individual could just kick off Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo. Besides, is that all I am? A fucking human sacrifice? How depressing. It feels like they just want to feed me into a paper shredder. Allies like to talk the talk, but they always seem to expect the most disadvantaged people to do all the walking.

All I can think is that I wish I hadn't been born. I'm not a dragonslayer born in the age of dragons. While I am as capable of righteous fury and frankly uncharacteristic violence as anybody else, I am a healer. I do my best work comforting people who are in pain, or caring for them when they are under stress.

You know why I wanted to go to college? I wanted to develop cutting-edge robotic prosthetics for disabled people, not least of all because I'm disabled myself. I wanted to develop programs to automate some of the most difficult and tedious tasks human beings have to perform so I could save us time and energy that could be put towards taking care of ourselves and each other. I wanted to save us pain and misery. And there are thousands of people like me across the world, all just barely scraping by under fascist boots.

I just want to be able to learn without feeling like there's a time limit. I can't focus when I'm worrying about keeping food on the table. Time spent not working is money lost. My work suffers when I can't fulfill my needs, and all I have the spoons to do is play video games that let me escape to universes that are in mortal peril, and yet are still more enjoyable to live in than the real world.

I want to meet people and have meaningful conversations. I want to make friends, and have adventures, and fall in love, and experience loss with the support of my community. I'm tired of being isolated by my work schedule and my commute. I'm tired of the rich chaining me down by my needs.

I don't even know how to end this. I don't feel like looking on the bright side or pushing my pain to the side with dark humor. I'm just sitting alone in my room, avoiding my family and my pets because I'm too angry and I'm scared to let them know just how fucking close I am to losing it. They can't do anything more for me than they already are. We're all in the same position.

I wish I could be the guy who starts the revolution. I wish I could go up the hill and light a certain famous housing developer's private dick-stroking of an art museum on fire. I wish I could tell my landlord to go apply for foodstamps, because I'm not paying them another cent. I wish I was any more special than anybody else so I could carry the torch, but I'm not. I have loved ones who would be completely helpless without my support. And I don't deserve the help any more than anybody else, so this isn't me begging some wealthy patron to "pick me."

I'm just done. I wish we could all wake up one morning and just stop taking it. I wish we could just unanimously decide that we would stay home, visit our families, tend our gardens, walk our dogs, visit the beaches, and take what we need without paying a thing. I wish to God that that could be a possibility. I don't want violence. I don't want acceleration. The people who are the weakest in our society are the ones who would suffer for that.

I cannot change these circumstances, but I also cannot accept them. I can't just accept that this is going to be my life. I'm 30 and feel like I'm already looking forward to a hospice bed.

[zikydoesthings]

A snippet from Chapter 9 of my story, The Birthday Party

"I'm guessing he's still in the garage?" William asks when Victoria opens the door. He notices that there's still boxes in the living room like last time, but chooses to not say anything about it yet.

"Yeah, and the door's locked and I can't find the key." Victoria tells him. The sound of the TV playing is in the background.

"If you want I can pry it open with a knife. He probably has the key with him."

"Yes, please. As long as you get him out of the garage and to Freddy's I don't care." Victoria says.

She was about to head towards the kitchen to grab a knife for him when William says "Don't worry about getting one from there. I already have one." as he pulls a pocket knife out and flip it open.

"Do I even want to ask why?" she asks.

"I always keep it on me just in case." he says, sliding the blade into the door frame. It takes an almost alarmingly short amount of time for Victoria to hear the lock click.

William closes the blade and puts it back in his pocket as he opens the door. The two of them step into the garage, find Henry slumped over on the table all but covered with parts, fast asleep based off the quiet snoring, take one look at each other, and just know that they're both thinking the same thing. Mess with Henry.

"Pot?" Victoria asks, smirking.

"Definitely." William responds. Victoria quickly grabs a pot and large spoon from the kitchen before handing them to William.

"I did it last time, so I figured you should do it this time." she explains.

"That sounds fair." he says, taking the objects from her.

He stands across from where Henry was slumped over and waits until Victoria has her ears covered before banging the spoon around in the pot as he yells "Wake up!"

Henry shoots up, banging his head on the pot in the process, before yelling back "Fuck you!" at William as his friend and wife laugh. His voice sounded slightly hoarse from misuse.

William makes his laughter die down before he says "Really? Saying you want to fuck me in front of your wife? Henry! I thought you knew better than that!" with what was obnoxiously fake shock in his voice. William notices the stubble on the lower half of Henry's face. The fact that it wasn't anything more than that was a sign that he had at least shaved every once in a while.

"Hey!" Victoria joins in, making her own laughter calm down enough so she can talk in an understandable way "If that's what the two of you are into I'm fine with that!"

This causes Henry to shoot up from his seat yelling out "No!" as he points between the two of them, only succeeding in sending the two in another fit of laughter.