Fanny, my sweet, beautiful girl

17.11.2012 – 14.04.2019

Halu! I love reading your rivetra fics especially the heart skips a beat <3 you're such a great writer! was hoping if you can try to write rivetra modern au during the pandemic? :D

here you go~ ah, i always take a long time to write now, but at least it was out before the pandemic is over ^^" (as much as i would like it to be over ...) i hope you like it ~

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Love in the Time of COVID-19

Rivetra. COVID-19 Pandemic AU.

9543 words.

Read on Ao3!

Levi Ackerman is hugely germaphobic and antisocial. For him, the COVID-19 global pandemic is simultaneously the worst and best thing that has ever happened. People have finally begun to wash their filthy hands, cover their mouths with the crook of their elbows when they sneeze, and wear masks over their mouths to slow the spread of airborne contamination. All non-essential workers have stopped going outdoors, which makes Levi look less like a recluse and more like a normal person.

Of course, even these basic precautions couldn’t stop the coronavirus outbreak from growing into a full-blown pandemic. Maybe if everyone were more like Levi — washing their hands for a full five minutes rather than the CDC’s recommendation of a measly twenty seconds, bringing around a pack of disinfecting wipes and wiping down everything he touches, and rubbing his hands with hand sanitizer at least three times after he touches anything — the world wouldn’t be in this mess.

The worst thing about this pandemic, however, isn’t the fact that people are taking the bare minimum precautions, but the people who aren’t taking any precautions at all. For every person wearing a mask, there are at least ten people outside not wearing a mask. Hell, there are even people dying in the hospital of COVID that are convinced this whole pandemic is a hoax rather than a mess of their own making because they refuse to wash their own hands. It’s because of these people that Levi has to be especially careful on the few occasions he leaves his apartment, stripping off all his clothes as soon as he walks through his door and tossing them in the laundry basket before he takes a shower with scalding hot water to kill off all the germs he may have brought home with him.

For the most part though, Levi doesn’t mind pandemic life. It’s a lot like his life pre-pandemic, but he disinfects everything twice as much as he normally did before COVID. As a data analyst, he hardly went into the office anyway and he didn’t bat an eyelash when his company declared that everyone would be working from home until further notice. With delivery services becoming more popular, Levi found it was easier to get things delivered to his apartment. Even his neighbors are bearable. People are too busy working to be a bother during work hours and by the end of the day they’re too tired to do anything except turn on Netflix until they fall asleep on the couch. Really, Levi doesn’t have a problem with anyone except the woman living in the unit next to him.

Prior to COVID, Levi wasn’t even aware of her existence. He sometimes heard about her from the chatty woman in the unit across from him. The nosy woman somehow miraculously knew when Levi (or anyone, really) would be coming out of their apartments, popping out and ensnaring them in a conversation that always seemed fifteen minutes too long.

The gossipy woman loved the person who occupied the unit next to Levi’s. Levi’s next-door neighbor had moved in a few months before the pandemic started and was never at home, the talkative neighbor explained, because she was an actress.

“An actress in the theater. Musical theater, darling,” the woman emphasized, her eyes as wide as saucers like being in theater was the most magnificent thing anyone could ever do. “Poor dear is never home though. If she’s not rehearsing or on a show, she’s working part-time jobs at the diner downtown.”

Levi didn’t think very much of it after hearing about the woman next door for the first hundred times. It wasn’t his business what other people did. Anyway, if the woman was hardly ever home, that was even better. Except now that there’s a pandemic and everyone is required to stay home, the woman is home almost all the time and if Levi hadn’t believed the woman had a career in theater, he certainly does now.

The woman likes to sing on the balcony after work hours. It’s considerate of her but somehow also very infuriating to Levi because he can’t complain that he’s working. She also stops at an appropriate time (usually 8 or 9 at the latest), so it’s not as if Levi can send in a noise complaint without feeling like a dick. He just has to grit his teeth and listen to his neighbor belt out “If I Loved You” from Carousel while he cooks dinner.

She doesn’t have a bad voice either. It’s just that it’s incredibly loud. He supposes if she were any quieter, she wouldn’t be any good for musical theater. Maybe his other apartment neighbors are elated to have a living Disney princess sing for them for free every night, but it’s grating to the ears if you’re living right next door.

He probably should have said something when she started singing more dramatic songs, songs that crescendoed and built into a climax that Levi could probably hear if he were living on the other side of the apartment. It’s those goddamn musical ballads that Levi hates the most. If it’s upbeat, at least Levi knows what’s coming but those ballads always have to build and build until the woman is belting out to the heavens.

Levi thought he could bear it. Surely, the pandemic would only last for a few more weeks or even another month or two, but new coronavirus cases kept climbing and Levi knew he’d be listening to entire one-woman musicals for the next year if he didn’t say anything. One night when the woman begins yet another musical ballad, Levi finally throws open the sliding door to his balcony and is surprised when he sees his next-door neighbor sitting cross-legged on her balcony, a pink floral mask on her face, and a guitar in her lap.

The woman stops strumming her guitar and looks up, her amber eyes wide with surprise. “Hi,” she says, voice slightly muffled through her mask. She waves awkwardly at Levi even though he’s frozen in place on his balcony and hasn’t made any move to greet her.

“Why are you wearing a mask?” he asks her as if he’s not wearing one too. It makes sense that he’s wearing one. He always wears a mask when he steps outside even if there’s nobody around. He knows most people don’t because they don’t see the point if nobody else is around, so why is she wearing one?

The woman’s nose scrunches up from under her mask while her eyebrows are knit in confusion. “We’re in a pandemic. Isn’t that why you’re wearing one, too?” the woman asks, gesturing towards Levi and then her own mask. She pauses for a moment as if thinking about whether or not she should continue. “Also, I heard you’re a huge germaphobe.”

“Who told you that?” Levi snaps.

“The lady who lives across from you,” the woman replies.

Ah. That explains a lot.

“But I don’t even come out here that regularly,” Levi points out.

The woman shrugs. “Just in case. It’s better to be safe than sorry anyway,” the woman says. “And it’s not like it’s a big deal to wear a mask.”

Levi’s not sure if it’s because he’s been stuck in his house for months, but he’s just fallen a little bit in love with this woman and it’s all because she said wearing a mask isn’t that much of an inconvenience. He doesn’t even know her name. After meeting for five seconds and realizing that she’s considerate for wearing a mask on the off chance that Levi might go out on the balcony, Levi’s starting to feel like a dick for coming out here to yell at her for singing too loud. She’s a lovely singer, really, and he should probably be thankful she’s not a part of a screamo metal rock band or something.

Levi fights the urge to disappear in his apartment. He slides the glass door behind him, trapping himself outside on the balcony and forcing himself to speak more with the woman. He’s not exactly sure what he should say. Should he ask her name? Compliment her singing? Ask her about how she’s handling quarantine? He sits down cross-legged facing her.

“What song were you singing?” he ends up asking the woman.

“Oh,” the woman says as if she’s surprised Levi’s still speaking with her. She looks skyward, trying to recall the name. “‘Please Don’t Make Me Love You.’ It’s from the Dracula musical.”

“Oh.” Levi hadn’t been aware that there was even a musical adaptation of the Bram Stoker gothic novel.

“Yeah, I know,” the woman says with another nose scrunch, her mask shifting upward from the movement. “There’s a musical for everything nowadays.” She hums a few notes and strums a few chords across her guitar. “But what about you? How are you spending your quarantine?”

“Me?” Levi repeats. “I just … am hanging in there.”

“That’s good,” the woman says. Levi can’t see her smile behind her mask, but he does see the edge of her eyes crinkle. She sets her guitar beside her and leans back on her palms. Her head tilts to the side and her ginger hair falls away from her lithe neck. “I’m Petra, by the way. I don’t think we’ve ever formally met.”

That’s probably because Levi has never made the effort to be neighborly. In fact, the only reason they’re meeting right now is because Levi was going out here to complain about her singing, but he won’t mention that. Instead, he shrugs and says, “Levi.” It’s a lame introduction. Even he cringes at it, but Petra doesn’t seem to mind.

“I’ve never seen you out here, but maybe because I’m only on the balcony in the evenings,” Petra says. She picks idly at the guitar strings, letting their sound reverberate with every twang before she moves onto the next string. She stops suddenly and looks at Levi, eyebrow raised. “Oh, you didn’t come out here because it was too loud, did you? I know my voice is pretty … resonant, especially in a small space like this.” She winces apologetically.

Levi is thankful that his mask is able to cover the blush that is surely rising in his cheeks. “N-no,” he stammers. He sits up a little straighter as if this will somehow make him a less obvious liar. “I just … wanted some fresh air.”

“Mmm, makes sense,” Petra hums. Her eyes crinkle again and Levi’s heart does something weird in his chest. “Good to get some fresh air circulating in the apartment. I always have my air filter on nowadays too.”

Levi realizes with horror that she’s absolutely right. He usually keeps his apartment windows closed, opening them only in the early morning and the late evening for the fresh air. He hadn’t accounted for the lack of fresh air in the entire apartment complex. There’s no telling whose dirty air he’s been breathing these past months. Sure, he has at least one air filter in every room, but he can’t count on these machines to filter out every germ flying around the air. Why hadn’t he accounted for the poor air circulation through the building before this? He should have been keeping his windows open this entire time. The air outside is filled with germs as well, but the concentration of germs from other people who may or may not be spreading COVID within this apartment complex is much higher here than it is inside.

Levi stands up, grabbing the railing of his balcony for support. He feels a little dizzy right now and has the frantic urge to clean his entire apartment again even though he had cleaned it this morning. This time, he’ll be sure to deep clean the carpet.

“I have to go,” he tells Petra, but he doesn’t give her the reason. He doesn’t want her to think he’s an idiot for not thinking about air circulation sooner.

Petra raises her eyebrows as if she’s surprised and perhaps a little bit sorry to see him go. “Alright then,” she says. She picks up her guitar once more, strumming a few pleasant chords. “Have a good evening, Levi. It was nice meeting you.”

Levi pauses at the door. “You, too,” he says finally before he slips inside. He makes sure to leave the door open. The lack of barrier makes it easier for Petra’s voice to carry into his apartment. That’s not why he leaves his door open, of course. It's purely for the fresh air to come in, or at least that’s what Levi tells himself.

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Levi does not know why the news of the woman next door intrigues his friends so much. He had casually mentioned her once on a video call with them and now they won’t stop asking him about her, constantly requesting updates on little tedious things like the songs she had sung the night before and if she still wears her mask. Even more surprising, Levi finds he can’t ignore their questions and answers each and every one. He tells himself it’s because he knows their curiosity will never be quenched until he answers their inquiries and it’s better to respond than to be bombarded with the same question a half dozen more times.

“So you guys talk to each other every night?” Isabel asks. She sits closer to her laptop and her face fills the little square with her name in the right-hand corner. Her hands sit in her hands and she has a thoughtful pout on her lips. “That’s a lot, Levi.”

“We talk to each other every night,” Levi points out.

“And you complained that it was a lot!” Isabel says, which is true. He would have been satisfied with weekly Zoom calls or even fortnightly, but Isabel had insisted that going so long without seeing Levi and Farlan onscreen would drive her mad. “But that doesn’t seem to be the case with this mysterious next-door neighbor.”

“She’s hardly mysterious,” Levi snorts.

“She’s right, though,” Farlan comments. He isn’t perched at the tip of his seat. Unlike Isabel, he’s less intrigued about Levi’s new relationship with his neighbor and more amused about the whole thing. “You’ve never been interested in people enough to have regular meetups with them even if it’s a ‘coincidental’ meeting on the balcony every night.” Levi despises the way Farlan uses air quotes.

“It’s very Romeo and Juliet,” Isabel says with a nod. There’s a silence at the other end and Isabel adds, “Because of the balcony. Except this time there are two balconies and nobody is dying. Hopefully.”

Levi rolls his eyes. “I just bump into her more often now that I go out to get fresh air now,” Levi explains. It’s a part of his routine now. Better to breathe good, clean (or at least cleaner) air than continue to breathe in apartment air that has been god knows where. “Which, by the way, you two should really consider as well. Who knows what germs are floating around in your apartment complexes?”

Isabel wrinkles her nose. “If that were a problem, I would have gotten COVID by now,” she points out, and Levi wants to groan. He doesn’t want to explain to her once more that, after exposure to the virus, contracting COVID is a game of chance and she’s just been lucky. There’s no telling how much luckier she can get as the pandemic continues.

“I’ll consider it,” Farlan says, and Levi is at least grateful for that. He taps his fingers on his desk. Farlan’s microphone is so sensitive that Levi can hear the tap, tap, tapping noise on the other end. “But that neighbor of yours … what do you guys even talk about every night?”

“I don’t know just … stuff, I guess,” Levi mumbles. He rubs at the back of his neck. He can’t quite recall what he and Petra talked about yesterday on their balconies. Their conversations always start out similarly with her asking Levi about his day and Petra asking about his, and by the time Levi retreats into his apartment he finds that an hour has already passed. After a moment, he says, “Well, she told me about how she was sewing face masks in her free time so that she could donate them.”

“Oooh,” Isabel coos. Her head is in her hands again and she looks starry-eyed. “This girl sure has everything, doesn’t she? Not only is she cute, but she takes COVID safety precautions seriously and she cares about other people? No wonder you’re so interested in her, Levi.”

Levi’s mind stutters for a moment. “When did I say she was cute?” he stammers.

“Is she not cute?” Farlan asks with a raised eyebrow.

Levi’s knee-jerk response is to say “no” just because he knows a “yes” will elicit more teasing from Isabel, but the question Farlan asks makes Levi realize that he’s never seen Petra without her mask off. Prior to this realization, Levi has never minded seeing Petra with a mask on. After all, they’re both still in a pandemic and, even if neither of them show visible symptoms of COVID, it’s possible that they could still transmit the virus from their minimal outings for groceries or other daily tasks that require them to leave the apartment. Now that he’s realized it though, he’s overcome with this strange desire to see Petra’s face behind the mask.

There’s only so much one can see of a person when they’re wearing a mask. Levi knows the top half of Petra’s face quite well: slender, expressive eyebrows, large eyes the color of amber, and even the dip of the bridge of her nose. Anything beyond that is a mystery to him, hidden behind the cloth of Petra’s mask. He doesn’t know what kind of nose she has, if it’s grand and shapely or sweet and button-shaped or adorably upturned. He doesn’t know the curve of her lips, if she has a well-defined cupid’s bow or thick, full lips the color of petals. Judging by the state of the pandemic right now, it’s unlikely that he’ll find out anytime soon and he can’t fathom requesting Petra take off her mask just to satisfy his newfound curiosity.

“I don’t know what she looks like,” Levi finally says.

Farlan snorts and Isabel erupts into peals of laughter.

“You’ve been talking to her for how long and you don’t know what she looks like?” Isabel titters. She’s even wiping tears from her eyes, although Levi doesn’t think the situation is that humorous. “It’s not like you guys are wearing hazmat suits when you sit on the balcony.”

“It’s not like I don’t know what she looks like at all,” Levi grumbles. “But we’ve been wearing masks this whole time whenever we’ve gone out on the balcony to talk to each other.”

“Aren’t your balconies, like, more than six feet apart? You guys could probably take your masks off and it’d be fine,” Isabel points out. She sees Levi open his mouth to speak and she rolls her eyes, giving him a dismissive wave of her hand. “Okay, fine, just wear your masks like the hypochondriacs you are! If it’ll make you feel better about the ‘sick game of roulette viruses play when infecting us,’ go right ahead!”

Levi scowls. He wishes he could kick Isabel out of the Zoom chat, but Farlan has forbidden Levi to do that after Levi cut short the first Zoom call he hosted and Farlan has been the host of their Zoom calls ever since. Thus, Levi has had to sit through various Zoom calls with Isabel mocking his informative lectures on infections and diseases. On the bright side, at least she remembers Levi’s lectures well enough to recite them back to him even if it is in a sarcastic tone.

In a tiny square on Levi’s screen, Farlan watches with an amused expression on his face.

“What?” Levi asks.

“You could ask her if she’s comfortable with taking her mask off,” Farlan suggests.

“I can’t just ask her that!” Levi splutters. He gets embarrassed at the idea of it — just outright asking Petra as if it’s as simple as asking her about the weather or what her favorite color is.

Isabel rolls her eyes. “It’s not like you’re asking her to take off her shirt or something,” she says.

If Levi’s face wasn’t red yet, it certainly is now.

“Ignore her,” Farlan says. “But, you know, it is just a mask and you keep yourself extremely safe and she adheres to the CDC guidelines pretty well from what you tell us. If you two are both comfortable with it, why not just ask?”

Because it’s exactly as they’re saying: it’s not like asking her to take off her shirt. In a way, asking her to take off her mask is infinitely more dangerous and intimate than asking her to take off any other article of clothing. COVID-19 is a virus that is spread through aerosol droplets from infected persons. By asking Petra to remove her mask, Levi would ultimately be asking Petra to lower her defenses to these droplets and increase her chances of getting infected. If Petra were to ask him to remove his mask, Levi isn’t sure he would be able to say ‘yes’ for these very same reasons.

It’s something Levi mulls over even after the call ends and Isabel and Farlan bid him adieu for the night. He thinks about it in bed, imagining a different COVID-infected universe in which he musters up the courage to ask Petra to lower her mask for him and she says yes, revealing a beaming smile behind her mask when she lowers it for the first time. For some reason, just thinking about her smile and how it might look — if she has bunny teeth that stick out, if she has a cute underbite, if her teeth are just a little bit crooked, if she bothers to put on lip balm under her mask or if she forgets and leaves her lips chapped — makes it difficult for Levi to sleep. He spends his night tossing and turning in bed, haunted by a smile he’s never seen.

The thought of Petra’s smile follows him into the morning and well into the day. It’s all he thinks about as he cleans his apartment in the morning, he writes line after line of code at work, and as he cleans it once more in the afternoon. It’s all he thinks about as he opens the door to his balcony for his evening chat with Petra. It’s all he’s thinking about as he sits across from her and she tells him about his day.

He’s not brave enough to ask her to take off her mask, but he keeps thinking of it. He watches the movement of Petra’s mask as her lips move beneath it. If he concentrates hard enough, he thinks he can see the trace of her mouth, can imagine the outline of her lips when she purses her mouth in a pout or when he thinks her lower lip sticks out as she ponders what to talk about next.

“When do you think we’ll be able to take off our masks?” Levi asks. He’s brave enough to ask this at least.

“Hmm,” Petra hums, and Levi swears he sees the shadow of her lips pressed in that thoughtful pout once more. It drives him crazy. “Maybe when enough people get vaccinated. It should be a few months? My friend mentioned it a little while ago. They said it’s amazing how quickly mRNA vaccines are being developed to treat COVID.”

Levi nods. He’s heard this as well when doing his own research, although the technical aspects of the vaccine and how it works to protect him against the virus are beyond him. Still, he trusts medical professionals more than he trusts random people on the internet swearing that vaccines are just a conspiracy theory.

“So if you were vaccinated and it was two weeks after your second dose … and you were only in the company of someone who also received their second dose two weeks ago … would you consider taking off your mask?” Levi asks. He doesn’t look at her, instead drawing circles on the floor of his balcony. He can feel the dust and grime coming off on his finger and makes a mental note to sweep and vacuum his balcony tomorrow morning.

“I’d consider it,” Petra says. When Levi looks up, Petra’s mask is shifted upward just the slightest bit and the corners of her eyes are crinkled. He wants to see her smile so much. “If the other person were okay with it, too, of course.”

“Of course,” Levi repeats, his voice a quiet murmur, and he leaves it at that because he’s afraid of asking more.

But he lets himself imagine that the vaccine will be out to the public soon and, once it is, he’ll finally have the courage to ask Petra if she’s willing to take her mask off. He lets himself imagine that she says yes. And he lets himself imagine that the first thing she does when she takes her mask off is smile.

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Levi sits on the balcony with Petra at 1:58 AM. It’s the third night in a row that they’ve done this, sitting on their balconies with their masks on and the glow from their laptop screens illuminating their faces. Were Levi with anyone else, he would complain that this was an unreasonable hour to be up even if it is for the slim chance to snag a spot for a vaccine appointment, but because he’s up at this ungodly hour with Petra, Levi finds he doesn’t mind.

Technically, Levi doesn’t apply for a vaccine at this time. The rules are confusing, but he’s not supposed to schedule an appointment until certain other people have gotten their vaccines. People who are currently eligible are healthcare workers and essential workers. Petra, being a waitress in the food industry, is considered an essential worker and is thus eligible for the vaccine at this time. Is it irritating for Levi to watch other people get vaccinated before him? A little bit, but he’s glad Petra will soon get the vaccine. Unlike Petra, Levi works at home all day and is thus less likely to be exposed to the virus anyway. Even if he can’t book a vaccine appointment at this time, helping Petra book hers will help him prepare for scheduling his appointment when the time comes.

Petra yawns, using her elbow to cover her mouth even though she’s still wearing her mask. Levi feels horribly endeared watching her. She’s dressed in her pajamas — a cotton pajama set in black and white polka dot print and fuzzy cat slippers on her feet. Her hair is tied in a messy bun atop her head, stray locks of ginger falling around her face even though she wears a hairband meant to keep them away. Even as Petra continues to hit the refresh button, her eyelids droop and she looks as if she’s about to nod off to sleep soon.

“Abandoned slots tend to open up at 2 AM,” Petra murmurs to herself over and over. It’s like a mantra she keeps repeating, hoping that it’ll help her stay awake until she books herself an appointment. Levi doesn’t know how much it’s helping. “Abandoned slots tend to open up at 2 AM.”

“Should you really be staying up this late to book an appointment?” Levi asks. He hits the refresh button too, but the page remains the same. All appointments are full. “Don’t you have a morning shift tomorrow?”

Petra squints at him, concentrating as she fully registers his question. “Mmm, if I don’t get one at 2, then I’ll head right to bed.” Petra yawns again. As usual, she uses her elbow to cover her mouth. “I don’t know how people are booking their appointments so fast, but at least it seems like it’s a ‘first come, first serve’ type of thing. I heard it was worse at the hospital when they were first giving the vaccines out.”

Levi remembers hearing about it on the news and then hearing about it second-hand from Petra when she was talking about her doctor friend. There were some hospitals that determined vaccinations for their staff members by raffle, not even prioritizing doctors and nurses that were working first-hand with COVID patients. In the particular hospital that Petra’s friend worked at, COVID vaccinations were given out to higher-ranking doctors first regardless of whether or not they were working with COVID patients, which also caused a flurry of criticism from the hospital staff as well as media when the news broke out. The current system being used for front-line workers to get vaccinated certainly is inconvenient, but Levi doesn’t know what a better one would be.

“Just keep refreshing, just keep refreshing,” Petra says in a sing-song voice. She hits the refresh button robotically, but her eyelids are still drooping. Suddenly, she looks up, a little bit more awake than she was just a second ago. “Do you think my finger will fall off before I get an appointment?”

The mask hides the upward twitch of Levi’s lips. “I don’t think so,” he replies. He hits the refresh button and his eyes flicker to his screen. His eyes widen when he sees 10, 15, 20 spots open up at different pharmacies nearby. Quickly, he begins to turn his laptop around and points at the screen excitedly. “Wait, look!”

Petra takes one look at his screen and begins to tap around hers. She doesn’t even tell him that she sees them or thank him for alerting her because that would take a few extra seconds that might allow the appointments to fill up before she can claim a spot. Levi watches as Petra sits hunched over her laptop, the light from the screen allowing him to see how her brows are knit together in concentration as she types her information on the screen. She even has her insurance card ready beside her, filling in the necessary information easily. Levi doesn’t think he’s ever seen anyone type that quickly in his life, and he normally hits 100+ wpm when he’s writing code.

Suddenly, Petra hits the enter key one last time and looks up. Her typing has halted entirely and she stares at Levi with a blank expression on her face. It’s difficult to tell whether she got the appointment or if all the available slots had filled up at the last minute. It’s just an appointment, one that Petra can probably book later this week if not tomorrow, but the anticipation is making Levi’s palms sweat.

“So?” Levi asks. He’s never felt like it was hard to breathe wearing his mask, but he’s feeling a little breathless now. “Did you get one?”

A beat passes. Then two. Then three.

Suddenly, Petra raises her arms, lifts her head, and lets out a yell that’s far too loud for 2 AM in the morning. It’s so sudden that Levi flinches, but he sees that Petra’s eyes are crinkled at the edges when she faces him again. “I got it!” she proudly announces. She’s swaying as she sits. She probably used all of her energy just booking that appointment. Considering how tired and sleep-deprived Petra has been for the past three days, Levi’s surprised that she hadn’t made a typo at the last moment and missed her chance.

He’s grinning from ear to ear, not that she can see. “That’s great. Good for you. When is it?”

“Tomorrow morning,” she says. Petra shoots him with an endearing finger gun and winks. It makes his heart flutter in the oddest way. She shuts the screen of her laptop and the blue light that was illuminating her face disappears. It makes it more difficult for Levi to see the lines and creases in her mask. It also makes it a little harder for him to imagine the smile hidden beneath the fabric covering her face. “I’m going to call in sick and come in for my appointment. I don’t care what my boss says. It’s better if I get the vaccine anyway even if I might get yelled at when I come in tomorrow.”

Levi furrows his brow. “Are you going to be okay the next day? The side effects …” His voice trails off.

“It should be okay,” Petra says with yet another yawn. She should really go to sleep, but Levi doesn’t have the heart to tell her to go just yet. “The side effects aren’t really an issue until the second dose, I hear. Although, some people who had COVID said the first dose kicked their butts. Since I haven’t had COVID, it probably won’t be a problem for me.”

“But you won’t go into work if you happen to feel adverse side effects?” Levi can’t help but ask.

Petra doesn’t answer for a moment, just looks at Levi for a moment before her eyes smile again. “You’re sweet,” Petra tells him, and Levi’s flustered. For some reason, he wants to deny it, to tell her that he’s just asking what any reasonably concerned friend would ask, but Petra speaks again before he gets a chance to. “Yeah, I’ll call in another sick day if I have to. Thanks for worrying.”

Levi is about to tell her that it’s not a problem. Of course, it’s not a problem because helping her doesn’t burden him in any way, but he bites his lip instead.

Petra stretches her arms above her head. She gives him another sleep smile, one that Levi can only see in her eyes again, and waves at him tiredly. “That was kind of fun in a hectic way. Thanks for staying up with me these past few nights.”

Levi fiddles with the sleeve of his shirt. “It’s so I know what to do when it’s my turn to make an appointment,” he mumbles. He cringes when he speaks. He doesn’t sound convincing at all.

“Then we’ll do it again when it’s your turn,” Petra says. She points her index finger at him. “It’s the least I can do after you stayed up with me. I should do the same for you.”

He tells her that she doesn’t have to, but Petra insists and won’t let him go back into his apartment until he agrees. They have an undecided date for when they book Levi’s appointment. Petra, ever the optimist, says that the system will probably be less hectic by the time Levi’s eligible, but Levi’s not so sure. Still, he feels quite content as he returns to his apartment.

Petra gets her vaccine tomorrow. Levi wonders if he should construct a care package for her when she comes back and leave it at her doorstep. Not anything fancy, he thinks, just the essentials just in case side effects hit: canned chicken noodle soup, tea and honey, Gatorade, and a small bottle of Tylenol just in case. That’s probably overkill though, Levi sighs. He can think about being nice and thoughtful all he wants, but he knows he’ll back out in the end because there’s a chance that he’s overstepping his boundaries. He should just play it cool. Play it safe. Just pop out on the balcony tomorrow night and ask her how it went, if she was nervous, if her arm hurts.

It’s fine. He doesn’t need to be her caretaker. It’s good enough that they’re neighbors, two people in a short-distance relationship of six feet (or more) apart, unlikely friends in this strange time. It’s too much for him to hope to find love in this time of COVID-19. It’s enough that they’re just two people helping each other stay safe from COVID and booking appointments together. Maybe in a month or two they can be friends who are fully vaccinated against the virus. Two people who still take precautions against the infectious disease but who can live life in a little less fear because their chances of contracting the virus are lowered to about 5%. Two people who can smile at each other without their masks on.

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

Levi gets his vaccine two months after Petra. Like many other people, he suffered few side effects from the first dose except for a sore arm the very next day. The effects of the second dose are far worse.

He was warned by Petra, who told him that the effects of the second dose were like getting hit by the flu virus and a truck at the same time. He was also warned by various anonymous persons on the internet that were kind enough to share their vaccine experiences on online forums as well as medical professionals that posted informative online videos on YouTube. No warning could have prepared him for how bad the side effects really were.

Levi feels the effects of the second dose ten hours after he returns home from his vaccine appointment. At first, his arm just aches and he feels slightly drowsy. He doesn’t think much of it, thinking that these effects are mild compared to what other people are experiencing. After a few more hours, his body feels terribly cold and his entire body is aching. Everything irritates him more than usual: the light streaming in from his balcony hurts his eyes, the rattle of the air vent is grating to his ears, and the pounding of his head makes him want to bang his head against the wall until he passes out. To put it lightly, he feels like shit.

Petra said she only felt some muscle pain and had a slight fever for a few hours, but Levi feels like he can barely walk. The night Petra had her second dose, she only came out for a few minutes to talk to Levi before leaving to sleep early, but Levi doesn’t think he can even manage that.

Lying on the couch with a blanket draped over his body and an ice pack on his head, Levi manages to reach for his phone on the coffee table and type out a brief text message.

Levi:

Staying in tonight. See you tomorrow if I feel better.

Petra:

🙁🙁🙁

I hope it’s not too bad.

Feel better soon!

I hope you feel better tomorrow 😊

Levi wonders what she means when she says she hopes he feels better tomorrow. Does that mean she hopes he feels better so that they can see each other tomorrow? Or maybe he’s overthinking it and she’s just being polite. It’s normal to say “hope you feel better” when someone is feeling awful, isn’t it?

He doesn’t want to think about this too much. He should just rest instead of mulling about what Petra’s messages really mean. With a sigh, Levi turns his phone screen off and leaves it face-down on the table so that he’s not tempted to check his texts every time he gets a new notification.

Levi settles down against the pillows on his couch and wraps his blankets around him. He’s already taken a Tylenol, but it has only managed to dull his headache and not get rid of it completely. His limbs still feel achy, although not in the unbearable way they did an hour ago. He wonders if he should eat something. He had downed a Gatorade when he first got home and then drank another bottle a few hours ago, but he hasn’t eaten much except for a slice of bread and half an apple. It would probably be best for him to eat something else, but he doesn’t have the energy to get up off the couch and prepare something. Even a packet of ramen feels like it would be too much for him to handle at the moment.

He tosses and turns on the couch until he finds a position that he doesn’t hate. He’s not sure how he’ll be able to sleep when he feels this uncomfortable. He thinks it’ll take him at least an hour or two, but he drifts off without realizing and doesn’t wake up until he hears the ringing of his doorbell.

Groggy with sleep and muscles still aching, Levi gets up from the couch, his blankets dragging behind him as he checks the door. When he looks through the peephole, he doesn’t see anything. He’s too tired to even be angry about someone ding-dong ditching his door and he’s too feverish to even wonder why somebody would ring his doorbell only to abandon his doorstep moments later. He’s about to walk back to his couch and collapse into another dreamless sleep, but the thought that he might have accidentally called for some takeout while in his post-vaccine delirium forces him to yank open the door.

There isn’t anybody in sight nor is there a bag of takeout. Instead, there’s a basket with a note on it. Levi bends down to read the neat script printed on the paper:

Hope you feel better soon! I made some food that might help since you’re probably not in the mood to cook for yourself. 😊

-Petra

Levi stands there and blinks at the basket of food, wondering if this is all part of his fever dream. Maybe he hasn’t woken up yet. Levi is sure he’s dreamed this all up, but his body hurts too much for him to be still dreaming. He’s about to go in and text Petra to ask her if she really had left the basket of food for him, but he looks up to see the apartment door across from him cracked open and his gossipy neighbor looking at him, only her eye visible. Startled, Levi quickly grabs the basket and shuts the door behind him with a slam.

He carries the basket with him to the couch, setting it on the table. When he picks up his phone, he sees he has over a dozen messages. Most of them, unsurprisingly, are from Isabel, but when he scrolls to the bottom he sees he also has one from Petra. He taps on that one first.

Petra:

Cooking post-vaccine sucks!! I know from personal experience 😥

Left you some goodies outside your door jic you don’t feel like cooking. I hope you enjoy!

If it’s from Petra, then it’s safe to inspect the package. Levi lifts the cloth covering the top of the basket and peers inside. He pulls out a colorful tumbler first. The container is a pretty and pastel peach color that fades to white at the bottom. On the side it has a label with the same neat handwriting the first note had. “Peach smoothie,” it says with the ingredients listed in smaller print at the bottom: peaches, banana, greek yogurt, almond milk, honey, vanilla & cinnamon. When Levi looks at the other containers, he finds that they’re labeled similarly.

It’s difficult to explain how Levi feels as he sits on the couch and eats the rice porridge Petra had packed. The porridge is still warm, steam escaping from the thermos when Levi had first unscrewed the cap. Earlier, he hadn’t been in the mood to eat, but now he finds he can’t stop as he shovels spoonful after spoonful of rich, hearty porridge in his mouth.

It’s warm, Levi thinks, and he continues to eat. He no longer feels the chills that had confined him to his couch and forced Levi to wrap himself in layers and layers of blankets. He just feels warm and content, the rich broth from the rice porridge filling his belly and warming him from the inside out. There are tender chunks of chicken breast that Levi devours hungrily and tiny pieces of julienned ginger that balance the porridge out with a kick of spice and just the tiniest bit of sweetness. Levi doesn’t remember the last time he’s eaten so well.

He feels … so content as he sits back against his couch, upright for the first time in hours. He nibbles on the apple slices had cut for him, making sure to admire the little rabbit-ears she had taken the time to carve into each one. In between sips of the peach smoothie, Levi ponders.

Is it normal for neighbors to make food for their neighbors when they’re feeling ill? Is it something good acquaintances do? Is it something friends do? The last one is possible, although Levi has yet to receive a care package from Isabel or Farlan. Then again, he wasn’t planning on sending them one for their second doses, although he’s seriously considering it after experiencing the second dose side effects firsthand. It could be that his post-vaccine delirium is causing him to imagine things that aren’t there: affection, fondness … love?

Levi downs the rest of his smoothie and decides to sleep it all away.

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

Levi does feel better the next morning, but he doesn’t feel entirely okay either. He feels … strange. While the symptoms he suffered from previously are now gone, Levi finds himself suffering from new ones. They aren’t as uncomfortable as everything he had yesterday — fever, body ache, chills, headache, to name a few — but they make him feel anxious nonetheless. He could be one of the few cases suffering from deadly side effects after the vaccine.

Like any person without a medical degree or a friend in the medical field, Levi takes to the Internet to find answers. He looks up all the uncomfortable symptoms he’s feeling: chest pain, heart palpitations, light-headedness. When he thinks he’s found a consistent answer among various medical sites, he immediately calls Farlan over Zoom.

“I think I’m dying,” he tells Farlan immediately after his friend picks up.

Farlan furrows his brow, his blue eyes filled with concern. “You mean … you didn’t manage to get COVID right before your second dose, did you?” Farlan runs a hand through his honey-blond hair, looking around his apartment for things he needs to drive over to Levi’s house: his wallet, keys, a first aid kit. “Are you okay? I’ll drive over there really quick.”

“No, no. Not COVID,” Levi says quickly. He rubs his hand over his chest. “It’s just … I’ve been feeling strange. I’ve been getting heart palpitations. Sometimes my chest hurts and I feel lightheaded. I think I might have myocarditis.”

Farlan blinks once. Twice. He takes a deep breath and then breathes out. Calmer now, he says, “I thought we talked about you self-diagnosing yourself with different diseases. Just because you’re a hypochondriac does not mean you’re qualified to make these types of calls about your health.”

“I’m serious this time!” Levi says. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? There are other people who have taken the vaccine and have developed pericarditis and myocarditis. I’m not being paranoid.” Levi admits to being quick to diagnosing himself with diseases in the past, many of which were probably impossible for him to contract in hindsight, but he doesn’t know why Farlan is scolding him for being careful about his health.

Farlan sighs. He leans back against his chair and rubs his eyes. “Alright,” Farlan says. He sits up. He doesn’t look angry anymore, just tired. “Tell me everything in detail this time and don’t leave anything out.”

“Well, I told you,” Levi says. “Chest pain and heart palpitations and dizziness -”

“And these all started right after you received your second vaccine?” Farlan asks.

“Yeah, I …,” Levi’s voice trails off. He pauses just a moment and realizes it’s not the first time he’s experienced these symptoms. He’s felt it once or twice before, these strange pangs in his chest and his heart fluttering oddly. “It happened before. When I was with Petra.”

Farlan smirks. “Well, congratulations. It looks like you’re not sick. You’re just an idiot,” he tells Levi and then adds, “and in love.” Before Levi can deny it, Farlan hangs up.

Levi is still spluttering at his screen when a message from Farlan pops up.

Farlan:

Ask her out.

Levi stares at the message even as a million little notifications from Isabel pop up asking him why he called Farlan without her. He thinks about the message. He thinks about asking Petra. He winces when the thought of it brings an odd, sharp pain to his chest, the same one he’s been feeling all morning.

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

Petra smiles when she sees him that night, her eyes crinkling the way they do when she smiles and her mask shifting upwards. Levi still doesn’t know what her smile looks like, but he’s imagined it every night for weeks on end.

“Feeling better?” she asks Levi. She leans against the railing, her arms resting on top. Levi stands his railing too, but he doesn’t lean against it the way Petra does. It’s perhaps the closest they’ve gotten in all the time they’ve spoken with each other. “The second dose is really something, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Levi mumbles. He wonders if he looks terrible, if his face is pale or cheeks flushed, if there are bags under his eyes, if he looks any thinner than he was the day before. He hopes he doesn’t look too horrible.

Petra rests her head on her arms, eyes looking up at Levi. “So what are you gonna do once your two weeks are up and you have the antibodies?” she asks. “I mean, don’t go crazy and crowd surf at an unmasked concert, of course, but maybe you could go out and eat at a restaurant if they have outdoor dining or something.”

“Actually, I was thinking of staying home,” Levi says. His palms are sweating already and his heart is doing that thing where it’s beating erratically against his chest. His head is feeling strange. There’s a chance that Levi might faint and fall off his balcony where he’ll fall four stories until he hits the ground. He almost doesn’t believe it when he hears himself say, “I was actually wondering if you wanted to eat dinner at my place once my two weeks are over.”

Petra’s eyebrows are lifted in surprise. Maybe if she weren’t wearing a mask right now, Levi would see her lips shaped in a perfect O. After a moment, she asks, “Are you really asking me to have dinner with you on your first night of being fully vaccinated?” Her tone is teasing. It makes Levi blush and he almost regrets asking her until Petra says, “I’d be honored. Do you want me to bring anything? I can cook pretty well.”

“If you really want to,” Levi says. He doesn’t know how he’s still standing. A part of him feels as if he’s still on his couch in a fever-filled haze, suffering from the effects of the second vaccine. There’s no way all of this isn’t a dream. Subtly, he wraps his arm around his torso and pinches himself in the ribs. It hurts too much to be a dream.

He’s two weeks closer to seeing Petra without a mask on.

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

The night of the dinner, Levi finds himself frantically running around his apartment. He took the day off work just to clean his apartment even though he cleans it at least twice daily already. This time, he’s taken the liberty of dusting off the corners of the ceiling and making sure to get all the dirt from behind the furniture. He’s even cleaned the inside of each and every cabinet, including the very top cabinets that are a bitch for him to clean.

It’s overkill, Isabel and Farlan told him. They told him to just treat it like a normal dinner, to just pretend as if they’re the ones coming over instead of Petra, but Levi can’t do that. The difference between Petra and his friends is just too vast. For one thing, he knows that Farlan and Isabel don’t mind a bit of dust, but he’s not sure the same can be said for Petra. Because is so careful in following COVID prevention guidelines, he’s sure she would appreciate the extra time he takes cleaning his apartment just for her arrival.

He couldn’t decide what to buy for dinner. He knows Petra had offered to bring some food over for tonight, but it feels rude to assume that she’ll provide a full-course meal. The problem with ordering food himself is that he doesn’t know what kind of food she likes. Mexican? Italian? Chinese? Indian? There are too many possibilities. He doesn’t know if she has any food preferences or allergies either, and he’s far too nervous to ask her. Levi doesn’t know how to cook for shit, so ordering takeout is the norm for him, but it’s different when you’re ordering for another person. In the end, he orders one dish from different restaurants hoping that at least one dish will be able to satisfy Petra.

Then there’s the question of what to wear.

“Just wear anything,” Farlan groans. He’s splayed out in his chair and looking up at the ceiling. He hasn’t looked at the past dozen outfits Levi has suggested. “Wear your all-black grunge number or a three-piece suit. I’m sure it doesn’t matter.”

“I can’t just wear anything,” Levi hisses. “What will she think of me?”

“You’ve seen each other at 2 AM with only pajamas on,” Farlan points out. He yawns, not bothering to cover his mouth. “I’m pretty sure you two know each other well enough not to mind the other person’s fashion choices.”

“You should wear those tight leather pants,” Isabel says. She leans forward in her seat, her head in her palm with her elbow resting on her knee. “With that see-through shirt. And put some hair gel in your hair. Also maybe put on some eyeliner.”

Levi blinks. “I don’t have any of those things.”

Isabel groans. “I know, your wardrobe is sooooo boring!”

He shouldn’t have asked Farlan and Isabel for their help. He ends up with a mask, a sky-blue button-down, his darkest pair of jeans, and more anxiety than he had this morning. Petra should be here any minute and he’s feeling strange again. The same symptoms as before plague him: dizziness, pains in his chest, heart palpitations. The chime of his doorbell is enough to make him jump out of his seat on the couch and almost fall on the floor.

Levi scrambles for the door, pulling it open. There Petra stands, mask on and a bag full of food she’s prepared for tonight. She looked nice more than six feet away when they were standing on their balconies, but she looks even nicer standing right in front of him. He’s about to say as much when he notices the door across from them open and his neighbor’s eye peep out from the crack. Startled, he pulls Petra in just as she’s saying hello and slams the door behind her.

He breathes a sigh of relief only for his breath to hitch in his throat when he realizes that he’s trapped Petra in between him and the door. They’re standing far closer than six feet apart. It’s closer than six inches apart. It’s even closer than six centimeters. He can count every strand of ginger hair on her head, every eyelash, every freckle sprinkled across her cheeks.

Startled, Levi stumbles backward and apologizes. “S-sorry,” he stammers. His cheeks are flushed red with embarrassment, the heat made worse with his mask on. “The woman in the apartment across from me was staring.”

“Oh, yeah,” Petra says. She looks behind her, although there’s no way for her to see the neighbor now that Levi’s door is closed. When she turns back, her eyes are crinkled. “She talks a lot, that one.”

“Yeah,” Levi mumbles. He stares at Petra. He can’t help it. There’s a smile hidden behind her mask. He can see it if he only asks. He’s closer to seeing it than he’s ever been. Soon, he’ll know what lies beneath. Cautiously, carefully, Levi asks, “Would you like to take off your mask?”

“Sure,” Petra says. She unhooks the elastics from her ears. She removes the mask from her face, looks at Levi, and smiles.

It’s more beautiful than Levi could have imagined: a dimple in her cheek, freckles sprinkled across her skin that her mask had always covered until today, and just the slightest overbite in her smile. It makes Levi’s heart do a weird flip in his chest, worse than he’s ever felt before. His palms are sweating and he’s feeling light-headed. He’s not sure he’s even breathing.

Breathlessly, Levi tears off his mask. “Can I kiss you?” The question falls from his mouth without him thinking. He’s about to take it back and apologize for being too forward, but Petra takes a step closer to him.

Her smile is dazzling, growing wider as Petra takes a step. Her eyes crinkle the way they always did on the balcony. “Sure,” she says and reaches to place one hand on the back of Levi’s neck before pulling him in for a kiss.

It’s perfect.

2021 Reading for BTS and the collective!!

Wow wow wow! I didn't disappear or get dragged away by a demon. No no, I just got thrust into unexpected shadow work and I now have an unhealthy obsession with sea shanties and a love of pasta.

I had this idea planned to be early in January but that didn't pan out so I'm doing it now. I have another yoongi reading in the works and another fun thing coming soon as well!!

I promise I won't bore you to death any longer but I hope you've all been doing well!!

Disclaimer: This is for entertainment purposes only and not to be taken as fact.

If this message doesn't apply, let it fly!

Cool cool cool.

Let's get it.

💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜

Oki. I first want to say that this I gonna be long lol. I did a meditation and gathered some little pieces of things y'all might need to hear and then I pulled cards for every month. The fountain tarot deck is the cards for us, the collective, and the rider-waite cards are for bts. It'll make more sense when I add picks and stuff. I did a little extra card pull for yoongi for the month of May too :) I'll make sure to type out all the cards in text so you know what they are (the pics are kinda wack.) I also used my pendulum to ask if there was a bts related event for every month and that's at the bottom. It's just to take in the possible energy for the month and something that could result from that energy!

LETTUCE BEGIN (hehe)

Starting with the section for the channeled messages. I want to reiterate that this was collective so if it doesn't resonate with you, the message might not be for you! Use your intuition.

(Enough talking. Damn)

So. As I said this was through meditation and connecting to the big column tree thing (I told my cousin about the tree/pillar and they were like,, "so basically a big energy dildo in the æther?" .... I CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT IT. h e l p m e) and asking if there was any messages or advice that needed to be delivered and it was... intresting?

Things came fragmented. So there was little messages like, "Its gonna be okay" and "things are changing for everyone" and "open your eyes if you want to see" (that's sassy.) There was one particular thing that was confusing me though. Straight up it was just "flower" on repeat and like a really bad picture of a flower? Like you could tell what it was but it was bad quality. Anyway, I was like "okay. Kindly shut the fuck up. Pls." And I wrote down flower, pink flower and rose. Sooo.... idk but there you go.

More messages were things like, "the block isn't in your head", "try calling forth that which you seek" and... February. Possibly there is specific (very very very loose) connection to the 10th-19th? I'm not to sure what or why but I'd say maybe look out for opportunities on these days and also maybe external events.

Continuing with dates. In the last this 21 and January 21 came up. It came up again but with 2 messages. So first, either 21st is a day where something is put into motion (possibly private or public) or announced and the second was "add them together dumbass" that's not very kind but 3. Again this has been discussed too but but but... maybe a signal of a third mixtape 👀 (not necessarily on the 21st per say but possibly in March? I'm really not sure).

Oki. I got side tracked like I always do and started thinking about tattoos and stuff and I really want koo to have a peony tattoo. I feel it in my BONES. It would suit him so well. and as I was thinking about tattoos I heard, "don't be surprised if yoongi gets/shows a tattoo this year" ??? What the fuck? I think maybe they messing with me but now I have hopes and I don't want them to be crushed and thrown to the wind :(

Back to normal stuff, "the theme is growth" I think that fits very well with the reading. "Blue might be a lucky color" self explanatory. It might be lucky. "Start practicing grounding and centering" this was LOUD. This will help you in how you react to events in the future. Really do practice this if you haven't.

This is where it gets a little weird. So, I got a message that said "start living as if you never existed." I am not a 100% sure what this means but I think I have a pretty good guess. I hate to make it sound weird like this but by sort of focusing on something that is so hard to comprehend (because our brains can't comprehend not existing very well) you kinda break the 4th wall? Like in Deadpool when he addresses the audience and is aware that he is a character played by Ryan Reynolds? anyway, focusing on something that seemingly impossible you kind of accidentally open up the floodgates for a lot of other things. I would say if you are not in the right headspace to do this don't do it but it can be a powerful way to break up the monotony of reality. The theory that everything happens simultaneously bc time isn't a linear progression events blah blah we are energy blah blah the multiverse blah blah.. Theres so so so so so so so so so much about this and how it applies to things that I could probably write you 10+ dictionaries worth of material but for the sake of simplicity and not wanting to write a novel right now, I will continue. The main lesson is to start challenging your perception of the world around you. Ask why and why and why and why. Essentially seeing cracks in the matrix. Pulling your head out of your cosmic ass, realizing that rose you're smelling is actually daffodil ect. It's not supposed to bring you fear but just kinda encouraging you to question all the things that you perceive as given truths.

I tried to make that sound cohesive but really it's such a big concept that I can't really wrap it up all nice and neat.

Oki. May and March are also important times.

Listen to your intuition and try not to take everything so seriously. I'm not saying to check out and go squat in the Himalayas but it's important to find joy in the now. Life is already tough enough so don't forget to watch a silly show that you like or change your hair to a style you've never tried, wear makeup in a very loud way. Just have fun and don't worry so much about things that you can't control. Listen to yourself and your intuition.

Well that was all over the place. Let's get on to the actual tarot part now.

For the record, the pictures are right to left.

January for the collective

We have the empress, the sun, 7 of swords and a fortune that says "act well your part; there the honor lies"

Hmm. Ngl I was a little confused to see the empress and the sun for January... I mean it hasn't been great. So I pulled clarity card 7 of swords. The 7 of swords is all about betrayal. It's about the deception and and actively getting away with things. This is people lying, cheating, sneaking and the works.

This makes much more sense!! The Sun card is usually about joy and success and happiness but in this case I see it as illuminating the betrayal. It's shining light on the deception and keeps the spotlight there. Its also an energetic card so I think that shows passion for uncovering the truth.

With the empress card too I think January is all about getting creative in all forms. Creative ways to protest, to mourn, to celebrate, to connect. Also taking in the abundance that we DO have. The beauty that surrounds us. I like to think of aphrodite energy for this. Its not just love and passion and creativity but is also asserting yourself and having strong passion for what you love and fighting for it. Did you know aphrodite was also called upon in ancient Greece in times of war? She was honored as a goddess of war but still a goddess of love, the sea, fertility ect. What I'm trying to say is that being a creative and "feminine" energy is in no way weak. Sometimes the most powerful things come from this energy. Love aggressively with good intentions. The point is that you should take whatever you're feeling and translate it into something creative or something you care about. The fact that covid is still a thing really sucks but take any rage, hurt, sadness, joy, love whatever and use that shit to make something amazing. Bake bread and punch the fuck out of it, paint your frustration, play hopscotch in higheels while you listen to heavy metal. You get the point.

Now January for BTS!!

We have the death card. (I only pulled one card bc I have things planned from this)

January has been... strange? To say the least.

This card can be a lot of things for them. I think this points to more maturity in their music? Like they've finally ditched the "shiny kpop boy band" label and are being taken seriously in the west. I also think that they're going through a musical/concept transformation~ I think it also signified the change in plans bc of the Grammys perhaps they had things planned an that fell through so they were forced to rapidly change plan/course.

For January: possible mixtape or announcement.

February for the collective

We have 8 of coins reverse and hanged man reverse.

The 8 of pentacles reverse talks a lot about self improvement. Doing that good good inner work and self care. Working on developing parts of you that you've maybe neglected. It's also learning how to work with how you are instead of wishing you weren't the way you are. If you have a therapist its a great time to maybe ask for any extra tips that you can practice daily to help you even more. Maybe exploring more into insecurities relating to finance or jobs or your passions. If you don't have a therapist but you have the means to get one I always highly recommend. You don't have to have "problems" to see a therapist. Everyone could use a non biased point of view that is literally trained to help you be you best self. If you can't get therapy, I get it. Shits tough rn but there's still things we can do to better ourselves like Journaling and reading therapy blogs or self help books (not the taky shit) or trying a hobby you fell out of touch with. There's also a lot of places where you can get therapy promise on the internet. Most importantly, better yourself in the way that you need. Take time in February to take notice of what you want to improve upon. The 8 of coins reversed does come with the warning not to get stuck in perfectionism. Go easy on yourself and if you find yourself getting frustrated when working on projects, try to take a step back and practice whatever it is in a fun way and then come back to it later

Hanged man reverse talks about knowing that you need to chill but you don't. You'll need too. Maybe you'll find yourself swept up in work and tasks and you're over whelmed and know you need to stop and catch your breath but you resist. Why? Well, perhaps you're trying to ignore reality by filling the empty spaces with things and stuff so you don't have to face what's bothering you. Not wise. Take time for yourself. There's also the flips side where people are just kinda stuck.. creative block. Maybe you want something to turn out one way and it just isn't, so your stuck and frustrated and can't move past it. Let go of your expectation of how it should be and let it be what it is. Go with the flow and maybe you'll see a new way to overcome your problem. You'll eventually get that break through that you need! The theme of February is about self improvement. Listen to yourself.

February for BTS

We have judgment.

Hehe yeah. This card is about rebirth and the inner calling. Letting go of the old to step into the new version of you. This is also a very spiritual card lol. This can talk about a new decision that you have to trust your gut on. This is a very significant card that screams comeback to me. It also can talk about sharing your struggles with a group of people and that to me sounds comeback ish. Maybe this will be an announcement in February, maybe they'll be working on it idk but this is ultimate comeback energy so I hope they utilize this for a big group project!!

February: possible BTS comeback (even my pendulum knows)

March for the collective

The chariot and justice

This plays directly off of February! With the chariot you're taking the self improvement that you've done and putting it to action! Now is the time to act on the dreams and passions that you have don't wait and hope for the best. March is about action and standing in your power.

Justice card is cause and effect and truth. What you do will have consequences good or bad. Not doing anything also has consequences. Cease the moment and make the best of it. You'll be taking responsibility for what you do. You start a business? Now you have the responsibility of running it and you get the credit. Stuff like that. Stand by your decisions with conviction and trust yourself.

There's also the side of justice that talks about bringing justice. If you've been wronged, you'll be brought justice if you stand up for yourself.

We also carry the continuous lesson of learning what we truly believe and challenge those beliefs!

March for BTS

Oki we have the hermit and the 6 of pentacles reverse.

Well... let's start with the 6 of pentacles reverse. This can really talk about being so generous and giving to everyone else that you forget about yourself. I think that maybe they might be over exerting themselves and giving so much that they're exhausted physically and emotionally as well. I think too, they take on so much of our pain like its their own? Idk but this would be a good time to do a large scale fan project to show them a little extra love!

With the hermit card it talks about a self introspection so they could be looking inward as a team and kinda evaluating their bond.

I also see this as maybe being alone as in they maybe can't physically go to the grammys? Or maybe they had been planning the rescheduled concerts and they had to be pushed back even further? Things like that. Regardless this signals re thinking/reevaluating the goals that they have and considering what direction to go in!

March: possible mixtape or solo project?

April for the collective

We have 6 of coins and 3 of cups reverse.

Let's start with the 6 of coins. It's about sharing. It can be about charity so sharing money via donation but also giving time, effort, energy to people as well. Giving knowledge is good too! It's an all round exchange. Maybe someone lends you money or you lend money to someone. It's give and take. It's a two way street. It's also a card of balanced finance. So money stuff should be looking promising around this time (for you U.S people this could point to more stimulus help as well)

And for the 3 of cups reversed... I see this as reopening of places and people struggling to find the balance. So think people who've been in lockdown celebrating by throwing a big party... yikes. This card reminds that we should be mindful of the long-term consequences that come with our actions.. maybe also people that are experiencing fear of being in public places now. This is only one facet though. Bc I think this also means in general, missing being with friends and having a renewed relationship because you've really realized how important it is to have these people that mean so much to you in your life. Don't forget that you have people that love you and want the best for you. Call them when you feel alone.

April for BTS

The heirophant

Mhmm. This one kinda gives me vibes that they'll be mentoring people? Idk but I see them more as the heirophant teaching what they've learned/ know to help guide others. HOWEVER this could also be them taking a new task under their belt. Learning something new. Since this is as a group reading I assume that this talks about the group as a whole. This card is also very tradition oriented so maybe they are taking lessons that are connected to traditional Korean culture? Maybe its for RUN or maybe its to incorporate into music and preformance. Think bts mma preformance but all of them learning together? Idk, it's just a thought (maybe wishful thinking). It also talks about seeking counseling so maybe they'll do yoongis idea from the most recent RUN.

This can also be them embracing this kind of leadership/ status.

April: I got nothing. It does feel like something though

May for the collective

Five of cups and queen of cups reversed

Five of cups is disappointment, regret and self pity. Now honestly this to me looks like possibly a tightening of restrictions yet again. Regardless of the situation that this is talking about, the best thing you can do is not wallow in the bullshit. You scrape yourself off the pavement and move foward. You'll need forgiveness of yourself and others and that if shit isn't going your way, you need to pull your head out of your ass and look around bc there's options out there. It's like drowning in a kiddie pool. Just stand up, dude. The water is like 5 inches.

Queen of cups reversed talks about self love and self care. It's more of that look inwards energy. Think about really taking care of yourself. May might be emotionally draining so you need to be ready to take care of you! Part of self care is making sure that your boundaries are well enforced.

Be on the look out for codependent behaviors. Check in with yourself.

The queen of cups is very intuitive and having it in reverse can talk about you not taking enough time to listen to it. Make an effort to meditate for like 5 minutes a day at least. Do something to let yourself connect to your intuition and higher self.

May for BTS

9 of pentacles

This about enjoying the fruits of your labor and absolute abundance and luxury. This could talk about them rolling in the dough after signing a new partnership or having a concert or something if the sort. This could also be a time where we see them buying new things like houses, cars and rings (lol) but also this could be them doing a very high production value project! Also namjoon and his bonsai army are thriving in this time!

May: possible concert or scheduled concert event. Activity of some kind.

Yoongi interlude

I asked for one card to give me an idea of what the mystical May 13th really is. I got: the star, 2 of cups, 4 of wands, the world and the sun.

Guys. I can't with this. 2 of cups is a card of union, romance, soulmate. 4 of wands is celebration, joy, homecoming, bliss. The world is completion and the sun is happiness, joy, marriage, enlightenment.

I've said it a billion times but that's some soulmate shit. So soft so cute and May will be eventful for his personal life.

June for the collective

Death and the heirophant reversed.

Wow wow wow death is transformation and a new chapter so a new way of life and something new/ different that changes how we see things. Again this could be relating to new covid things and new policies and stuff like that but also new as in new to all of us. Groundbreaking perhaps?

The heirophant reversed talks about teaching yourself. Being your own teacher and making your own path. This might be spiritual or otherwise. Challange what the world wants from you and instead listen to what you truly want bc you don't need anyone's approval. Continue to ask questions about why things are the way that they are.

June for BTS

Page of pentacles

Oki oki page of pentacles means a new creative venture and manifestation. Maybe something that they've been wanting for a while finally comes to fruition. This might be the start of a new project that they haven't done before or something cross genre? Idk but its a really good sign of being motivated for a new endeavor and manifesting any projects that they've ever wanted to do. Love this promising energy!!

June: idk

July for the collective

10 of swords and 9 of cups reversed.

10 of swords signals a painful ending. Also deceit. Its a necessary end to a long battle. The only thing you can do is control how you react in these situations. You just kinda gotta surrender into the pain and know that it's temporary. Take time to reflect on what happened and why and how it will help you grow.

The 9 of cups reversed talks about valuing stuff and material things over emotions and spiritual things. This can be talking about society in general, that we are becoming more aware to the fact that there is often more value placed on ephemeral items rather than humanity as a whole. This also can be talking about coming to the realization that we've been working so hard towards... something we don't really care about simply because we were told that it's what you do.

If you want something different to happen you have to put in effort. You can't be sitting in front of a water fountain being like, "damn. I'm thirsty. I really really want water so why isn't it in my mouth yet?" Like?? Hello? You have to take the first step, my dude.

Certainly don't try to do anything that would cost you finatial security or health.

You have the potential to find happiness within yourself. So try looking inside instead of looking outward.

July for BTS

4 of swords.

This is about rest and relaxation!

Taking time to meditate and take some time to look at what you've done objectively. Ots like the hermit in a way but much more focused on resting and relaxing so you can come back stronger and with better direction. Maybe they'll take a break for a couple days but I really see it as them reassessing options. Especially if July goes how I think it will. Maybe they'll film something like In The Soop again? Maybe we'll see bon voyage type thing? Idk. But it could be something kinda out of the spotlight? Maybe something more healing?

July: maybe something?? I'm not sure but it seems like something might be in store.

August for the collective

5 of coins and the wheel of fortune

Well let's see. 5 of pentacles talks about isolation and a negative mindset. This talks about falling on hard times but its a temporary set back. This energy can be talking about falling on hard times emotionally as well. In the card it shows a woman outside of a church shivering and cold but she's too busy thinking about all that she's lost that she doesn't notice the warm church that she could step into for shelter.

But then with he wheel of fortune that talks about fate/destiny, opportunity and luck so maybe this is a necessary loss so that a new door can open. This does kinda tie in with July as well. The end of something is painful but it's often a necessary thing. Might be a bit uncomfy but that's how things change. Again I see this maybe hinting more towards society but none the less it's definitely a theme for August to have doors closing and new ones opening so be on the lookout for that.

August for BTS

The devil.

Now don't fret. The devil talks a lot about choice. Most notably the choice between instant gratification and and something more substantial and the devil leans towards indulgence. It also has a lot to do with the shadow side. This could talk about ~scandal~ sure, but I think its more of a time where you become aware of negative patterns and you shine a light on that part you've ignored. On a much lighter note this card talks also about an incredible bond between people. It can be unhealthy if not given space or boundaries. Listen to pied piper and come back to me.

I also REALLY REALLY REALLY hope that this card points to this: sexuality. The boys have always been pretty pg when it comes to the topic of sex and embracing sexuality so I really do hope to see something more daring and grown up and exploring a tastefully sexy concept. On the same vain as sexuality this card also talks about kinks and stuff like that so don't be surprised if we get more outfits like fake love Era bondage harnesses.

August: ???

September for the collective

We have the world and 10 of wands reversed.

The 10 of wands reversed talks about carrying burden. Doing extra work and taking on more responsibility. Doing everything by yourself and carrying this heavy load alone will get you burnt out quicker than anything. You might be taking on too much and you'll need to prioritize what you really need to focus on. I also think there will just be a lot happening in September for a lot of people. It's a lot of working hard because you know it's good work or because it's what's right. This could be social responsibility that's placed on you or work responsibility. For whatever reason this burden isn't something you want to share with others because you think its yours alone to deal with. It's not though bc you'll figure out eventually that if it hurts so much you'll find a way to lessen the burden. 10 in tarot is all about the completion of a cycle and going through the wands cycle is hard work because for anything to be made of passion, you need to put the work behind it. The burden isn't forever, the heavy work load will lighten but this is you seeing things out. It's a good thing!

Especially considering this is paired with with world. The world is all about completion and that's what you're doing here is finding completion. You are seeing things out until the end but you just need to learn to give up some responsibility, lessen your burden.

This also talks about hard work being put into wider social spheres as well. Things like the vaccines becoming more widespread through the whole globe or at least better planing and infrastructures not related to covid. Things are looking up!

September for BTS

Knight of swords reverse

This bad boi is restless energy. It's being so pent up that you're ready to burst and you really want to take action but you can't because something is keeping you from taking that action. Again I do think this is kinda covid related in regards to touring bc if they do tour in 2021 its gonna look a lot different. This energy can be a bit impulsive and directionless so I think maybe they'll channel this into album material something? I'm not really sure tbh. I'm suprised this energy didn't show up earlier because it almost seems inevitable.

September: no clue

October for the collective

Ten of coins and the star reverse.

Welp let's start with the 10 of coins. Its about wealth, financial security, and long term success so this is a pretty prosperous time. This talks about the obvious monetary wealth and material wealth but also an abundance of opportunities. So this is definitely a good time to enjoy whatever consistency you have. This energy is really really abundant in the career space as well. So October could be very prosperous in the job field and you'll have likely found what it is you really want and could be successful at. This could be the actual act or just the idea. This is could also talk about investing in something for your future, this could be time or money.

With the star reversed it can talk about a loss of faith and a disconnection. This often points to feeling like you've just been forgotten or left out. Like the universe doesn't give a shit about you and left you out to die. Things might seem unfair but always try to look for the lesson that you can take from the experience. Seeing the 10 of coins and the star makes me think that a lot of people have kinda lost faith in their manifestations and also just in the concept of not living in a state of need. Especially if you see other people doing well and you've been trying so fucking hard but you haven't gotten a break. I know we hate to hear it but this can serve as a test of faith. Or rather an opportunity to get your shit in line and take a second to breath. Do something good for yourself and then continue on. This star in reverse serves to show you what no longer sparks joy and helps you find what does and what that initial spark was in the first place. Helps you get back to the original vision/ spark.

October for BTS

5 of pentacles reverse.

This signals the end of difficult times and getting that groove back. The last month was restless energy with no where to go but this month that energy is certainly put to good use. They might be figuring out what has been missing In their lives and starting to rectify that. They are definitely reminded that material wealth doesn't bring spiritual or emotional wealth. Might be also feeling a bit alienated too.

October: something is likely but idk

November for collective

Six of swords reversed and the moon.

Transition and change is prevalent. The 6 of swords is about leaving behind the familiar. Maune this is leaving a job, a new change in the status quo, leaving a relationship ect. The thing you have to keep in mind is just how amazing this is in terms of what it will do. It will alow growth!! And bring clarity!! Thos can also be societal as well, something being left behind in favor of something new. It's letting go and reflecting so that you can move foward.

This is strengthened by the moon card. The moon card is the subconscious and all the things that come with it. The anxiety, the illusion, the uncertainty. You'll want to deal with whatever emotions come up. The moon can signify a confusing time where things aren't what they seem to be. That's the illusions so you'll have rely more on intuition at a time like this. Your dreams might hold significance in this time as well. Listen to your guides and your own guidance because it will help you understand more than you did before this journey began. Using moon cycles to your advantage in November might really help you!!

November for BTS

7 of wands

Challenge and competition. People are envious of bts. We know this. But people will be challenging them for what they've gained: music industry domination. This might co.e in the way that people will spread vicious rumors in attempt to disenfanchise or possibly it will be a fair fight. It could also be a challenge/ battle for some other aspect that involves legal matters.

My best guess though is good old competition. Bts has proven again and again that they will continue to do what they do how they do but they will not be trampled over. In the best way this could renew some of that spirit in friendly competition. They will tear eachothers throats out for a pack of ramen so maybe a bit of competition will be good for them. It keeps life intresting.

November: nothin

December for the collective

Two of cups and the emperor!

Let's start off with the emperor card talks about stability and order. It can also signify being the "breadwinner" so its a good sign that you'll kinda be on top of your shit. The emperor is also an amazing leader so you might find yourself taking on a leadership role too! This is very organized energy that works very smoothly!

two of cups is such a lovely way to end out the year! It's love and partnership and attraction so if you aren't in a relationship by this time you might meet someone who strikes your fancy!! On a none romantic relationship note though, this card is also great for business partnership bc it signifies that you're on the same page and have the same goals in mind!

It's harmonious relationships and trust between them!! Love love love this energy so much! Cups are the suit of emotions and this card is so promising.

If you are in a relationship, this can talk about "falling in love all over again" like you're just reminded of how good they are.

December for BTS

Queen of cups

Intuition, creativity and emotional stability. They're using intuition to guide their moves foward with emotional maturity. They are in a place of knowing what they want and why. This would be a good time to work on an album or a book or to release them. The queen of cups is like the friend that you can tell absolutely anything and somehow they have a helpful answer. This card is really calm and it can also talk about subconscious thoughts.

I think that bts is maybe making more of a conscious effort to make sure that what they do is just as emotionally fulfilling for them as it is for us! They might be kinda pondering the future at this time and considering if this is what fills their emotional cup!

December: possibly a thing?

Now these cards are the vibe of the year and some advice.

For the collective (on the left)

Three of swords and judgment reverse.

The fortune says "accept the challenges, so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory"

The 3 of swords is about disappointment and hurt and heartbreak. It's about the emotional release that we all need when shit gets tough. Don't pretend to be strong. If you need to cry, fucking cry. This year is about letting go of expectations and do what you have to do to release so you can move foward and not have these things pile up.

You have to make an effort to not let yourself take on what other people think of you. You aren't defined by what some asshole says. You define yourself.

Judgment reverse is about self doubt and ignoring your path. It's being stagnant and being harsh on yourself. This year has a focus on building yourself up and noticing when you are not. Bring light to the things that are holding you back without harsh judgment for yourself. You can't beat yourself up. If you make a bad decision you know not to make it again. Take accountability and move on.

The oracle card is inner temple.

Seriously all the focus of this year is in self improvement and dear god, please take time to work on yourself spiritually!!! Everything you want to know is there if you take the time to listen. This should be a place where you feel safe and welcome. It definitely should not feel like something you HAVE to do.

For BTS

10 of swords and page of swords

The fortune says "you create your own stage. The audience is waiting" (how tje fuck?? This is the perfect fortune)

The 10 of swords is a painful but necessary end. This is accepting the current situation. They maintain focus for 2021 for them is adapting and keeping their spirits up.

With the page of swords it talks about new ideas and that kind of creativity. It's also a lot about communication so I really think that they'll be figuring out new ways to connect and new projects that will be prosperous.

The oracle card is Pleiades

This is what we talk about all the time. Bts has helped so many people want to be better and do better. They are uplifting humanity and giving people a sense if belonging. Bts finds you when you need them most 💜💜💜

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Wow I had to write this up over 2 days bc this was so fucking long. I need a nap. Idk if I'll proof read this before I post it so don't hate me for the mistakes (honestly, there's like 10,000 spelling and grammar mistakes in my other posts too 🙃)

I hope you guys enjoyed it and maybe this will be helpful to to have a forecast of some possible energy for you to look out for!!

Also bts bc I love them. I have another bts 2021 reading I'll do soon too!

Hope you guys are happy and well 💜

1266

Retaking this survey I took nearly exactly a year ago, which would be around the time of one of the lowest points in my life. A lot has changed and I’m *so much* happier these days, but it doesn’t hurt to revisit and acknowledge the emotions I went through then.

Are you afraid of lifts? 2020: I only feel afraid if I’m the only person riding the elevator. If I ever got locked inside I’d always feel a lot better if there’s at least one other person stuck with me. Otherwise I try not to be too bothered by lifts. 2021: Yeah, as much as possible I would still only get in if someone else was also planning to get in; elevators that are also visibly old and unmaintained tend to scare me away, too. But generally, riding the elevator isn’t a phobia of mine.

Who did you last talk to in person? Is that person attractive? 2020: That would be my mom and yes, I think she’s very attractive. Not in that way of course, but you know what I mean. She looks very young for her age and we always get mistaken as sisters. 2021: My dad. Sure, I think he looks okay.

Have you ever had a deep, personal conversation with a stranger? 2020: As much as possible I don’t like having deep conversations with someone I barely know, but sometimes I can’t escape the situation and I end up being a part of those talks. The nicest conversation I had was with a client during my first internship – he has his own company now, but over breakfast he told me about his struggles, his old unfulfilling 9-5 job, and gave me so much valuable life advice. He was so genuine and so nice and at that time I stopped minding the fact that he was a stranger and I’d most likely never encounter him again. 2021: Ooh I remember that. Yeah, he was lovely to talk to and I definitely have not encountered anyone with stories like his ever since. Anyway, I’ve grown to be a lot more extroverted over the past year so I certainly wouldn’t mind a conversation with a stranger, as long as they haven’t established themselves as a creep or pervert.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your own appearance? Why? 2020: Probably an 8. I don’t have a problem with my physical features for the most part, but I don’t like my front teeth and that my body hair is thicker and grows more quickly than average. Those are the two things that mess with my self-esteem the most, and the two factors that took out the missing two points. 2021: 9. I still have the same points for self-esteem issues; but I’ve embraced them slightly more over the last year.

Who was the last person to send you a message on Facebook? When was the last time you saw that person? 2020: Rita. I probably saw her sometime in early March. Maybe during a board meeting for our org before the lockdown was implemented. 2021: Angela. Sometime mid-July, I think? when we went to the BTS pop-up store together with Reena and Hans. I might see her again next week for her birthday. I have to see her reaction when she opens up the present I plan to get her.

If you decided, at this moment in time, that you were going to make a sandwich, what would you put on it? 2020: Assuming my hypothetical pantry is full, I would go for a southern-style chicken sandwich with chicken breast and spicy mayo. My stomach just rumbled, what have you doneeeeee 2021: Holy shit that sounds so fucking good right now. Can I just steal my own answer? Spicy crunchy chicken sandwiches are the shit.

Are you good at controlling your emotions, or do you tend to let them get the better of you? 2020: It’s 50/50 at best. Sometimes I let self-control win since it’s usually the most responsible choice and it’s also to avoid drama, but there are days where I recognize that self-care is just as important and so I allow myself a healthy release whether the release is one of sadness or resentment or anything else. Repressing my emotions and letting them bubble up over time isn’t healthy, either. 2021: I’m a lot better at it now. I think I have done a lot of growing and maturing and processing over the last year, and I don’t get into dramatic outbursts nor repress my feelings too much anymore. Whenever I feel deeply I let the emotions stay, but I also know when I need to reach out and seek help.

At this moment in time, what do you want the most? 2020: Normalcy. 2021: At this moment in time, I wish I could go back to when I took this survey and reassure the me then that everything was going to turn out absolutely fine. But right now I wish I also had sushi.

How many times have you cried over the person you love/like? 2020: Too many. 2021: I don’t love anyone in that sense.

How exactly are you feeling right now? Why do you feel the way you do? 2020: I haven’t been feeling anything in particular these days. To be honest, I’ve just been doing a lot of…floating around, existing, trying to make it to the end of the day unscathed. I believe I’m feeling this way because there’ve been a lot of major life changes happening and I simply wasn’t prepared to deal with all of them simultaneously. 2021: Jesus Christ that was brutal to read. How the fuck did I...manage? Anyway, right nooooow I feel quite content because a new episode of Run BTS came out and I really enjoyed it!! I also feel cozy because it’s actually quite cold tonight, so it’s making me feel sleepy faster than I would like lol. What’s the relationship status of the last person that put their arms around you? 2020: She’s been married for the last 23 years to my dad. 2021: He’s been married for the last 24 years to my mom.

Has the last person you held hands with, ever told you that they love you? 2020: Yeah. 2021: ^ Gross. But yeah to answer this question in 2021 – yes she has, in a platonic, sisterly way. We say it all the time.

Is there someone you used to hang out with all the time, and now you don’t anymore? If so, do you ever miss that person? Why do you think your relationship changed?   2020: Sure, Sofie’s the first person I thought of because we used to be the best of friends. We simply grew apart when college started, since she studied in Manila and I was all the way in another city. It would’ve been too difficult to keep up the friendship with both of us also starting to have different goals and priorities, as well as new friends. I miss her sometimes, but I’m not desperate to see her anytime soon. I’m sad to see our relationship fizzle out the way it did, but we’re both pretty happy and have been doing well and that’s enough for me. 2021: I stopped hanging out with Aya because she is an abusive piece of shit, and I obviously value my friendship with Jo far more than tolerating an abuser and keeping them around in my life. As for missing her, no, not really. I’ve always found it easy to cut people off and wipe out the positive sentiments I would use to have about a person.

Who was the last person you talked to, whose name started with ‘H’? What color are that person’s eyes? 2020: I don’t know a lot of H people so it was probably Hannah even though I haven’t talked to her in a while. Her eyes are dark brown/black, like nearly every Filipino. 2021: Hans. Same, dark brown/black.

Who was the last person you talked to, whose name started with ‘M’? How did you meet that person? 2020: OMG this was so tough to think about. The only person I can think of is Angela but that’s only because her first name is actually Maria. We met on the first day of 1st grade, back in 2005. I accidentally stabbed her with a newly-sharpened pencil and made her palm bleed, and for some insane reason a lifelong friendship was established that day. 2021: Macky. He’s a coworker but is a couple of positions above me. At first I took issue with my workplace not using honorifics, but when I learned it was a tactic to get everyone comfortable with one another, I soon got used to it.

The person you love/like is offered a job in another country. Would you let them go, or try and convince them to stay? 2020: Let them, because that was what we agreed on. 2021: No matter my feelings towards the situation, I would never interfere and ask them to stay.

Is there anyone you dislike so much, that you actually can’t stand to be around them? 2020: Back in college I hated being anywhere near a frat guy. They all had the same vibe, had the same fashion sense, used the same slang, had the same shitty work ethic so I always knew whenever one was nearby. 2021: One of my uncles, who I believe has COVID literally right now because he refused to get a vaccine. Can’t say I feel awful.

When was the last time you wanted to cry, but didn’t, because you didn’t want to show that you were upset? Why? 2020: I’ve been hiding my emotions and my tears from my family the whole month because we’re not a showy family when it comes to our feelings. We deal with our emotions privately, in our own bedrooms. 2021: Like two weeks ago when my teacher in my Korean classes shared a song recommendation with us and it turned out to be this really emotional, introspective song about dealing with life anxieties. It was beautifully sung and I nearly cried, and the only reason I didn’t was because I was in a virtual class full of strangers and I wasn’t about to start bawling my eyes out in such a situation lol.

If you found out that someone had been talking about you behind your back, would you confront them? 2020: I probably only would if they’ve always been super nice to me to my face but talking shit about me if I’m not around. It would be something I’d want to get into the bottom of. 2021: Depends on who the person is and if I think they’re worth my energy or not.

Which do you think is worse - saying something and then wishing you hadn’t, or not saying something and wishing you had? 2020: I hate nothing more than being too afraid to say something and then never having the space to say it again. That’s the type of regret that stays with me and keeps me up at night. 2021: I still go with the latter.

Do you know anyone who seems almost incapable of showing their emotions? 2020: I wouldn’t say I know anyone exactly like this, but I know of people who have built a great big wall around themselves and are super defensive when it comes to their emotions in a way that you’ll never know if they’re going through something. The first person I thought of was JM. 2021: My dad is extremely unexpressive. I guess I can say I kinda get it - he has to keep up his image as the father of the house and all - but I hope he has his own, healthy ways of processing his emotions, even if they have to be done in private.

What are 3 things that are guaranteed to make you smile, or put you in a good mood? 2020: Good Mythical Morning, seeing my orgmates, and driving. Driving seems to put me in a really good mood these days, though that’s likely because I haven’t had to do it as often as I used to. 2021: BTS, my dogs, and talking to Angela and Reena.

Do you look more like your mum or your dad? 2020: I’m a carbon copy of my mom, I’ve been told more times than I can count. 2021: Well yeah, that hasn’t changed.

When was the last time you saw your grandparents? 2020: I last saw my paternal grandparents in February; with my maternal grandma, two Thursdays ago. I have not seen my maternal grandpa since June or July 2015. 2021: Start of August for my maternal grandma; and I believe it was June when we most recently visited my dad’s parents. I visited my maternal grandpa at his columbarium slot during his birthday last year.

Have you ever felt really attracted to someone, but been deterred because you found out they didn’t have a very nice personality? 2020: No. If I get attracted to someone, that means I’ve already decided that they’re attractive on all fronts, including their attitudes and personality. 2021: ^ That is such a damn lie lmao. I remember getting attracted to this boy Lance from high school and thinking he was so cute and that I should probably try my chances with him...but I immediately got turned off when I noticed how he was slightly immature for his age and I stopped pursuing him immediately.

Have you ever hugged/kissed someone you’d only just met? 2020: Probably when I was out drinking, yes. 2021: ^ That’s true but that only goes for hugging.

Where is the person you would most like to see/be with? 2020: There is no such person. 2021: All my friends and best friends are at home. At least they should be at this hour, lmao.

When was the last time you bought a CD/DVD? Which one was it? 2020: The last CD I bought was Beyoncé’s self-titled album, but I can’t remember if I bought it in late 2013 or early 2014. 2021: ^ 2020-me had no idea :’) Anyway, the last DVD I placed an order for was Map of the Soul ON:E, though I’m not getting that until October. The last thing I was able to successfully receive was my Butter CD set.

Have you ever gone against someone’s advice and then regretted it? 2020: I don’t usually ask my friends for advice since I don’t want to possibly be the jerk that asks for advice but goes against them. I’ve always just gone with whatever I think is best for myself. 2021: I guess I’m still the same as I found myself agreeing to those two sentences.

Would you ever apologize for something that wasn’t your fault? 2020: Welcome to my life. 2021: Before, I used to. I won’t let shit like that pass now.

What’s been the best thing about your day so far? 2020: I’ve done a good share of self-care activities today…I actually got up in bed and have been taking surveys, I ate a lot for breakfast, I took a shower, and fixed myself a cup of coffee. The bar has been set very low since August obviously, but considering I’ve been skipping out on a great deal of activities that used to make me happy, I’m just glad I accomplished several today. It’s the little joys, guys. 2021: Getting good feedback from my boss on a deck I had to work on all day today. Also the new episode of Run BTS, aka my favorite thing about Tuesdays.

Has anyone ever cried in your arms before? 2020: I can only recall one person who’s done this. 2021: Sure.

Who was the last person you talked to, whose name started with ‘C’? Is that person older or younger than you? 2020: Tina, but her full name is Christina so she counts. I keep forgetting she’s a year older than me. 2021: Coco. Yeah, I believe so.

Do you keep a lot of things from your parents? 2020: Yes. They know my good side - my awards, achievements, job prospects, all the shiny stuff they can be proud of. They don’t need to know how mentally fucked their firstborn actually is, because it’s not like they’d know how to deal with all that weight. 2021: Yes.

Who was the last person you confided in? Do you regret it? 2020: Angela. Not at all. She’s been my rock for the last 15 years. 2021: Andi, and no. I trust them with my whole life and then some.

What was the last film you watched, that you hadn’t seen before? What kind of film was it? What did you think of it? 2020: I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a psychological thriller. It’s not for the faint of heart, especially those who’ve been feeling depressed and/or existential lately. It certainly didn’t make me feel good and I wish I could unwatch it, not because it was bad but because it was a bit too triggering. 2021: Be With You; it’s a Korean film that’s mostly romance but with a super super slight tinge of fantasy if you squint your eyes hard enough. I loved it a lot; both the leads are sooooooooo pretty to look at and the kid is a fantastic actor. I also cried a lot, but I do think the ending could’ve been executed better as it felt rushed.

Have you ever had an argument with the last person you hugged/kissed? 2020: Lots. 2021: Nothing more than extremely petty fights, the last of which we had approximately 12 years ago.

Using one word only, describe the day you’ve had so far. 2020: Lonely. 2021: Routine.

So…did some digging, and apparently RT is working on V8-9 WHILE ALSO WORKING ON THIS ONE. They were working on 2 SEASONS SIMULTANEOUSLY, and as a result, 8 was "The most difficult to write". RT has learned NOTHING about taking their time, and with how V7 went, and how the trailers/sneak peeks for this V. come off as INCREDIBLY lackluster, this is might be gearing up to be WORSE then 7. At least 7 had a good start but jumped into irredeemable by the end, this might face plant the first episode.

It’s either going to faceplant or it’s going to improve when it comes to the cohesiveness of the overall story. I still think Covid, the various dramas, etc. will impact this season - how can they not? - but it’s still possible to get the structure of a good story with specific flaws easily attributed to things like, “This would have been better if everyone wasn’t trying to create during a traumatic, global pandemic. Because though RWBY does rush/not have enough time for the complex story it’s trying to tell, I think an equal problem is a lack of planning... and if they’re writing two seasons at once, that’s planning. It might still be bad planning, it might still be too much for them to handle, but it’s a step in the right direction: Have the next couple seasons in mind so that what you’re writing now makes sense two years from now, you can successfully set up long-term arcs, you can implement foreshadowing, etc. Most writers do that to one extent or another. “I’m actively writing Chapter Three but I’m also thinking about/writing bits of Chapter Five because I've thought through how things in Chapter Three are going to develop.” That’s a good thing. 

To be clear, the writer might still be horrendously overwhelmed if they’re expected to write, in full, two seasons at once, but honestly at this point I’d take two linked seasons that are less polished but that work together over two polished seasons (or polished by RWBY’s standards) that feel entirely disconnected from one another because they wrote stuff in Volume 8, didn’t know what to do with it, discarded it, started introducing new cool things in Volume 9, didn’t know what to do with that either, and round and round it goes. For me, Maria remains an easy example of that. She feels polished to an extent in Volume 6 - they knew what they wanted her to do that volume, from getting the group moving again to giving Ruby info about her eyes - but once they hit Volume 7 it was, “Oh shit, we introduced a new character without thinking ahead to how she’d fit into future events. Now those future events are here, they take up a lot of time, there’s no time left to do things with Maria, even though her history demands that she should be involved somehow... so she’ll just hang out with Pietro, I guess.” 

Volume 8 might indeed be a complete mess - I am prepping myself for that lol - but if they’ve actually thought through how 7 segues into 8 and how 8 will impact 9... that might be a good thing. 

Supernatural: Inherit the Earth (15x19)

That was somehow simultaneously a crowded mess, and a complete anticlimax. I'm literally just like... super confused and afraid about what the finale is going to be now.

Cons:

Sam's the dog person. That's part of canon. I liked the moment when Dean found the dog, or whatever, but I wish Sam had gotten a moment with the puppy too, before Chuck took it away. A small thing, but one of those typical wrong details in Buckleming episodes, where it just honestly doesn't seem like they know the characters very well.

Lucifer and Michael have a fight in the Bunker and Michael takes Lucifer out really, really easily. So like. Remember when the first five seasons of the show were the buildup to the Apocalypse, and Sam sacrificed himself for an eternity in Lucifer's Cage to stop it from happening? Apparently a fight between the two archangels is just a bit of fisticuffs, nothing to get worked up about. That annoyed me. But I guess consistency has never been something this show has cared much about...

Also just... Lucifer in general, coming back for like five minutes so he can mug at the camera and then be unceremoniously killed? Here's the thing: we had Billie as Death, and she hated them but maybe it would have been interesting to see her and the boys team up to figure out Chuck's ending... but instead, she's gone, Lucifer gets a pointless return, provides us with another Death, who is there for two seconds, says a couple of vaguely funny lines, and then dies... and we still never find out what's in the book.

The fight with Chuck was so badly edited! It was so weird to see him just wail on Sam and Dean, and repeated shots of him hitting them, and them getting up, while he kept saying "okay fellas, enough, please stay down" over and over again. Given that the whole "erasing the people from the world" thing was so much like Infinity War, I kept comparing this fight with God to the climax of Endgame. In that instance, you have a small group of intrepid fighters going up against a big bad evil, and then just at the moment when they're run down and helpless, the whole crowd of friends returns and joins in the fight. Instead of that, it's just Jack showing up and absorbing God's powers, and then they leave him begging on the beach. Not a bad ending for Chuck, which I'll get to in a moment, but the epic-ness was seriously missing from this final showdown.

So, when Jack returned the world to its normal state, did he bring back all of their friends, too? I want to believe this was something that Covid took away from them, where instead of seeing shots of Charlie and her girlfriend, of Donna, Jody, the girls, Bobby, Eileen, they were forced to use stock footage of just random people around the world returning. Would have been cooler to see the epic return... and also super weird that Sam and Dean sit quietly in the bunker talking about free will, and we don't see Sam pull out his phone and call his girlfriend, like... I get not wanting to muddy the ending of the episode with a lot of fallout stuff, and I'm sure we'll get that next week? Like, I hope, anyway? But as it stood for this hour of television, it was super weird to me that the boys didn't immediately want to check on all of their friends to make sure everyone had returned from the dead.

Jack becoming the new God is actually a totally appropriate ending, people were speculating that he'd be the new God or Death or Empty, or some cosmic entity, anyway... and this honestly felt very fitting... BUT, I will say that there are two really, really stupid things about it. One, his "I'm everything and everywhere now" speech was super cheesy... "I'm in the air and the rocks and every drop of rain" or whatever. Such a cliche, I was almost painfully embarrassed listening to him. I honestly would have preferred less is more, here. Like, what if he'd said the stuff about how humans can be their best when they need to be, that was a good line... and then Sam says "what if we want to see you? Grab a beer?" And Jack just says "I'm around" and then vanishes, leaving it vague? I think the idea of a hands-off deity is perfect, of course... makes sense for the "free will wins the day" ending we've got going here, but I didn't think stating it outright was the best move.

The second reason Jack becoming God was rendered kind of comedically awful in the way it happened is... well, elephant in the room, let's talk about how Cas was handled in this episode.

Here's a quote from last week's review:

"I'm worried that Cas dying is gonna get swallowed up with everyone dying and not get its due, thus making the confession completely isolated. Like, here you go, gays, have this one scene, which, in isolation is quite heartfelt from Cas' perspective, but can be carefully boxed up and not touched for the last two hours of the show. If they don't want to touch on how this would affect Dean specifically, they don't have to. He can be generally angsty and sad about Cas, but they could get away with never bringing it up again, and that is some grade-A level bullshit right there, my friends."

And... yeah. Look, I know there are people on Tumblr right now saying that this episode being the "brothers only" ending means that next week we'll get Cas back and Dean will confess his love or whatever... but y'all, it's not going to happen. I'm sorry. I'd love to be wrong. If I'm wrong, I will gladly eat crow and celebrate along with the rest of you, but I just... I've been burned before. I know what's going on here, and it's not what you think it is.

Dean was undeniably devastated in this episode. We see him drinking to excess, falling asleep on the floor, grasping onto tiny moments of joy like with the dog and then being furious and upset when they fall through. But that devastation was not textually about Cas specifically. Sure, there were moments, like him telling God to bring everything back, and then namedropping Cas specifically. Or the way he ran up the stairs when Cas' voice was on the phone. But what I'm saying is? Those are crumbs, there for those of us who care to gobble up, easily ignored and subsumed by the larger losses the boys are suffering. Sam is devastated too, guys. About his girlfriend, about Charlie, about Donna, and Jody, etc. etc. etc. Who's to say their grief is any different from one another, even though they're handling it with different coping mechanisms? The "I love you" wasn't even on the "previously on".

Like. There's a universe where Dean does get a moment of Cas-related catharsis in the finale, even though Misha's not coming back. Maybe he has a private moment to grieve just for him, to contemplate that specific loss. But I'm telling you: I don't care if an openly gay man wrote 15x18, I don't care that Misha found it moving. The bottom line is, Cas confessing his love for Dean was the moment of catharsis the show was willing to offer us. We ain't getting much else.

So going back to Jack, why on earth does nobody suggest that maybe when he's popping the rest of the world back to the way it's supposed to be, he also brings Cas back? This is what I'm talking about with contrived sacrifices. Last week, they could have written a way for Dean to get out of that scrape without Cas dying. And this week, Jack's determination to be a "hands-off" God is not enough to explain why he wouldn't restore his father Castiel from the Empty. Especially since Chuck brought Lucifer back from the Empty, proving that God can do that. Even though that contradicts earlier lore but whatever. The point is, I'm saying it's sloppy. Cas' death, Cas staying dead, does not feel like an earned inevitability to me. I'm prepared to eat my words if they bring him back in the finale, but even if that happens (which it won't), he's not going to be smooching Dean Winchester on the mouth, y'all. He's just not.

So then that ending. "Finally free," says Dean, completely unaware that he's echoing the theme from the end of season five but making it hopeful now for some reason? And that end montage felt like an ending 100%, and I won't say it was bad to see it, see all the memories, the characters... I mean, Charlie dancing in the elevator, getting glimpses of Ellen and Jo, Bobby, Crowley... I'm not going to complain about that, it was honestly quite fun, but it also felt extremely anticlimactic and gave us no sense of where the characters are going to go from here. And yes, I know we have an episode next week, it's just...

Here's the thing I'm scared of, and I'm going to go ahead and put it here in the "cons" section because I don't know where it belongs yet. Despite my complaints about this episode, thematically there was one thing it got right: the answer to defeating Chuck wasn't destined, it wasn't in a book of preordained endings. They had to come up with it by themselves, using the tools at their disposal, and they won, and they get free will now, they get the release from having someone else tell their story. Great. So... what does that leave us next week?

As mentioned above, I really don't think the final 43 minutes is going to be an epic gay love story where Dean fights to get Cas back, I really don't. That leaves us two options: either a tepid re-tread of the themes already established, an epilogue of sorts where we just get to see a life in the day, a new normal for the boys. I wouldn't be furious about this, but I also think it won't really feel like closure for me. They just keep hunting? They keep saving people? That's fine, I guess, but they can't really walk back the fact that God is their son, can they? When they die the next time, do they go to the Empty? Who is Death, now? Are Heaven and Hell okay? Are we meant to be convinced that nothing will ever come back to bite them in the ass, they'll live long lives, and a benevolent afterlife is waiting for them when it's over? I'm not convinced I believe in things being that simple, so it sort of seems like the show would end by saying "okay, and more of the same."

The second possibility is worse, though, that being a total status-quo shift, like the end comes and the Empty is after them and they have to become the new Death and Empty as some speculated, or some wild harebrained plot twist gets thrown in at the last second and undoes the actual good parts of the theme established here. I hope for the first, but I don't know that it'll make me happy, to be quite honest. I really don't want it to feel this way, but Cas being gone is the big elephant in the room, for me. It truly is.

Pros:

I did like the earlier parts of the episode, the eeriness and the helplessness of them being alone. Continuing with the Avengers comparisons, it was very similar to the long, slow opening to Endgame, where we see a lot of grief, a lot of helplessness, an lot of directionless moping. That felt appropriate and it made it all the more invigorating when Michael showed up, giving us a spark of direction in which to move.

While I thought the fight with Chuck was edited really strangely and didn't work for me, I did like this ending for Chuck. Very much like the end of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Chuck doesn't die, which he honestly would have found a satisfying, creative ending for his story. Instead, he gets to live on as a normal human, sans powers, and be forgotten. Brutal and appropriate! It ties back into the free will thing. Chuck can do whatever he wants with his remaining time, but he can't steal other people's choices from them any longer. It's the black and the white, the good and the bad, of being just... human. Which ties in with Sam and Dean being more or less hopeful about their outlook moving forward. (God, I'm so fucking scared they're going to screw up the few things I liked about this episode in next week's finales.)

Like I said, I did find Jack becoming God an appropriate ending for him as a character. It's the right type of bittersweet: he's there, and we can imagine that in the future, he does go visit Sam and Dean for a beer. Or maybe he doesn't, and that's okay too. Knowing he's at peace, knowing he's benevolent, and that he'll do the best he can for the people of the world(s). It's nice, a comforting deity instead of a manipulative overlord. And the fact that his benevolence and kindness and compassion are born out of a human mother, and two human fathers, and an angel who embraced humanity with everything in himself... instead of from Lucifer, who tried to create him in his image? Well, that's a lovely resolution for a character that became a surprising favorite over the years.

As I think I mentioned last week, I'm willing to let this show manipulate my emotions here at the end, when it can manage to do so. So yeah, of course I loved that Cas and Jack's names are added to the table along with SW, DW, and MW. Obviously that's adorable as hell. And as I said, the montage worked for me, it was certainly quite lovely. I just... like I said at the start of this, I'm just frankly terrified of what's coming next week.

I mean, here's the thing, I want an ending that honors Sam and Dean as the protagonists of this show, but I want it where they live in the bunker, and Eileen and returned-from-the-dead-Castiel live with them as their partners. If someone told me I couldn't change a thing about what's happened so far, but I could decide how the last episode went, that's how I'd end it. Showing a network of hunters getting support and able to live more stable, reasonable lives while still doing a dangerous job. Sam embracing his intellectual prowess and running things from the bunker, Dean and Cas going out on the road, Sam and Eileen going out on the road, or any combination therein. Jack watching over them benevolently from above. Jody and Donna and the girls living their best lives. Kaia and Claire as a couple, onscreen. A glimpse of a more stable afterlife, now that Jack is there to run things, the confirmation of a peaceful ending whenever our human protagonists do finally shuffle off this mortal coil. Peace, but change, too.

I just don't believe that's what we're getting. I can't believe it, and that makes me really frightened for what comes next week. I'm prepared to be pissed off. Quite frankly, I'm expecting it.

6/10

Episode 18: Three’s Company, Four’s Divine

Sources

Ishtar

Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus: Mesopotamia Timeline

Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus: Inanna/Ishtar

Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature: Inanna and Enki

Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature: Inana's Descent to the Netherworld

Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative: Composite Text of Akkadian Descent of Ištar

Journal of Near Eastern Studies

CON­STRUCT­ING THE IM­AGE OF ASSINNU BY MARTTI NISSINEN SAANA SVÄRD

Further Learning: Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature: Epic of Gilgamesh, Epic of Gilgamesh: Standard Babylonian Version

Nüwa

Oxford Reference

Mythopedia

Google Arts & Culture

Further Learning: Remarks by Ambassador Cheng Jingye

Danu & Tuatha Dé Danann

The Goddess Danu (YouTube)

Danu - Irish Goddess (YouTube)

Ancient History of Ireland, Tuatha De Danaan, Scythians, and Phoenicians (YouTube)

Celtic Mythology - An Introduction to the Tuatha De Danann (YouTube)

Further learning: House Shadow Drake - Don and Dana, Celtic Myth and Legend, Poetry and Romance, The Sacred Isle: Belief and Religion in Pre-Christian Ireland, Life Understood from a Scientific and Religious Point of View, The History of Ireland

Persephone

Hesiod’s Theogony

Homer’s Hymn to Demeter

Madeline Miller

Further Learning: Lore Olympus (webcomic), Punderworld (webcomic)

Attributions: A Ghrà by Damiano Baldon

Click below for a transcript of this episode!

Haley: Which goddess is three point three seven feet tall? Kelsie: Three point three seven? Haley: Yes. Alana: Do– do you want us to say? Do you want to say? Lexi: These jokes are just a quiz for Kelsie. Haley: I have to have multiple jokes? I'm not ready. Alana: I have one it’s fine. Haley: Okay well it's Demeter. Alana: And you know you should also you know in in in COVID times, in COVID times you should be standing Demeters apart. Lexi: Oh. My. Lord Jesus. Oh my god. I should say oh my lord Ashera [Ash-er-a]. Kelsie: There you go. Alana: Oh, that's very funny. Haley: I love when Alana’s– Alana: Ashera [Ash-ay-ra], actually please. Lexi: Yeah, right. I knew as soon as I said it I said it wrong. Haley: Every couple of episodes Alana will… like Lexi and I will say something, and Alana will be like “oh that's like really funny” in this tone and like… I’m always funny. Don’t be surprised. I don't need this from you. Kelsie: Actually Haley, you're quite hilarious. Haley: Thank you. Lexi: Wait, but how does that tie into social media? Haley: I didn't get to the question yet. The question is because for… well my dad doesn't listen to my podcast, but for my dad is the worst person to get Christmas or birthday presents and his birthday is January 2, so like hop skip and a jump right after Christmas. But he loves board games, and his favorite board game is Codenames, so I have printed out over two hundred photos– like family photos– of the like stupidest photos in the world. And I'm laminating everything so it could be his own Codenames pictures, replacing all of it. Kelsie: That’s good. Haley: And my question is, is there a photo from your childhood where you're like what am I doing but you have that second jolt of like no this actually makes complete sense when you're realizing like what you're doing in the photo? For me it was crouching down in like the seventh grade next to a kangaroo, waking up a kangaroo, and then immediately after getting punched. I also had bangs but it was Australia and humidity or whatever climate that just didn't work with my curly hair. Lexi: So that was a set up so I could say that the picture of me digging up a dinosaur… Which, famously on this podcast I get mad when people think archaeologists dig up dinosaurs. Kelsie: As you should. Lexi: But yes, there is a picture of me, five years old, digging up a dinosaur. Not a real one. I don't think they’d let four year olds do that. Haley: But the best part is the goggles! Lexi: I have goggles on to protect me from the dirt. Kelsie: That’s important. You don’t want to get schmutz in your eyes. Lexi: But I’ve never been on a dig where I wore goggles. Kelsie: Maybe you should. Maybe you should wear goggles next season. Lexi: You know how much acne I’d get around my face if I wore goggles in the heat of Israel? Alana: Yeah, right? Kelsie: Who cares? Alana: No, go to Ireland! [INTRO MUSIC] Alana: Hello and welcome to Lady History; the good, the bad, and the ugly lady you missed in history class. We're back recording new episodes, so here is Lexi. Lexi, what would you be the goddess of? Lexi: Cross stitching and tricycles. Alana: Do you want to elaborate or just leave it at that? Lexi: Well right now I am cross stitching and it's what I do with my hands when I'm talking because I have mental problems and the only way I can focus on something is to do something else mindless. And the tricycle is because I have an adult tricycle and an anecdote my dad took that tries to go into the bike repair shop to get the brake fixed and he was too embarrassed to say it was his daughter’s so he said his wife bought it for his mother in law. Alana: And I really like that question so I'm also gonna ask Haley. Haley, what would you be the goddess of? Haley: I think I would be the goddess of eggs, just because I would control them and like not take it in because like I don't wanna be the goddess of something like I destroy, so like… Alana: For the irony. Haley: The irony. Eggs. Alana: And it's our third ever guest, Kelsie! Kelsie, tell the listeners a skosh about yourself. Kelsie: Hi everybody I'm Kelsie Ehalt. I am a Master’s student at Brandeis right now and I'm going to go and list the department I'm in. It's just a lot of words, so get ready. But I'm in the joint program in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, those are two different departments, but they both have ‘ands’ which makes things confusing. But basically I study ancient history via texts right now. I do archaeology as well but right now since digging’s not really a thing because we shouldn’t travel because of the pandemic, I'm really focusing on languages for my Masters. And then I also incorporate the gender studies side of things into the equation, so I'm just looking at how gender functions in the ancient world and thinking about it from a not straight white man perspective, basically, because that's basically all that’s been published. And there’s some better scholarship coming out now, but there's still some work to be done so I'm doing what I can there. Alana: We do love all of that. And I'm Alana and I tried to start an all goddess religion when I was like eight. (Haley laughing) Alana: Me and my friend Kay who is one of my like oldest friends in the whole world, they're gonna get a shout out a little bit later as well because they sort of helped me in my research. We like tried to start up polytheistic all goddess religion when we were like eight. We like had a list of goddesses that we wanted to name and we like created little rituals. A great time to be had. Kelsie: Everyone should have just a religion creation phase I think. Alana: Absolutely. We called it Selenism because the main goddess was Selene. Haley is shaking her head at me and it's making me feel… ways. Haley: I love it but also like… Lexi: I feel like I was like writing fan fiction before I knew it was fan fiction, while you simultaneously were making a religion. Haley: Like I'm not surprised that either of this happened. Not surprised at all. Alana: It's a true story, it's a fun story. We kept a lot of ash in bottles… related to this religion that we were making up. Kelsie: Where did you get ash from when you were like… Haley: Yeah, that’s the… Alana: I don't think we still have it, but like we had it for a while. Lexi: No no no, where did you acquire it? Kelsie: What were you burning? Alana: Oh. From like. I don't remember. Haley: No that's a body. Alana: I think we just like burned paper or something and collected the ash. Kelsie: Oh, that’s not exciting. Alana: We played with a lot of fire when I was… Kay and I… we played with a lot of fire. Haley: Yeah! Yes! Yes. Lexi: I don’t know what to say. Haley: No, playing with fire… Wait, were you a Girl Scout too? Alana: No, I was a Daisy for half an hour and then they wanted me to do all this like stupid weird shit like say my own name in a group of people so that was a no no for baby Alana. Alana said no no to being a Daisy. Kelsie: Alright so I'm going to talk about my girl Ishtar today. So Ishtar is the Akkadian name for the goddess of love and war but the Sumerian version of her name is Inanna so I might switch back and forth between Ishtar and Inanna but know that by the later period they're the same person. There's some debate about whether Ishtar was a separate goddess who became then sort of like coagulated in with this earlier Inanna, or if Ishtar is just like a direct connection to Inanna, there's a debate about this, it’s not quite clear. So I’ll probably refer to her as Ishtar. If I mess up and instead of Inanna it’s because I work with the later period stuff so I don't really see Inanna too much. But anyway so Ishtar, Inanna is the Mesopotamian goddess of love and war. And she's depicted in all kinds of different texts, but obviously we have the most interesting sort of goddess information about her from the mythological texts, but she also shows up in legal texts because they're just invoking her to you know validate decisions, things like that. And people in this period, well in Mesopotamia across all periods of history, have personal gods so she’s invoked in sort of just letters too if they're just like “hey bud I'm sending you this thing, you know, good luck, thanks Ishtar or Inanna.” like whatever, she's brought up a lot. But for today I'm gonna focus on a few of the mythological texts because I think that's where we get the most interesting information about who she is as a character in the Mesopotamian religion. So the biggest story, or the story where she has the biggest role, is– the title’s translated, there's not really a title, they don't always title these tablets. But it's translated as the Descent of Inanna or Ishtar into the Netherworld. So I'm gonna give you a little summary of what goes on in that story which is… it's a fun one. I actually– this is one of the first things I– the actual– first actual texts I worked on translating in Akkadian, not just working out of the exercise the book but actually working with text. So I'm gonna tell you the Sumerian version a slightly longer, and there are more details, so I'm gonna tell you that version, and then I can tell you how the later Akkadian versions differ later. So here, Inanna–because this is Sumerian– she's deciding to go down to the netherworld. It's kind of conceived as like a cavern type thing underground so I guess I should go over Mesopotamian cosmogony first so we have Earth here which is where you know humans and mortals lived, and above that is the heavens, which is pretty standard for what modern Abrahamic traditions follow as well. But then beneath the Earth, we have the netherworld or underworld. In Sumerian it’s kur, in Akkadian it's kurnigi… I'll just call it the netherworld. And then between the netherworld and the Earth we have the Apsu, which is sort of this underground water where things happened too, and that's where Enki lives. And that's also– that plays a role in the creation story of Enuma Elish where Tiamat, one of the primordial goddesses who's the goddess of fresh water...? Either freshwater or saltwater I’m forgetting. She mixes with Apsu which is either freshwater or saltwater, whichever one she's not, and they create the other gods from there. So the Apsu is really important because it's sort of the origin point of all of the gods within Mesopotamian… the Mesopotamian pantheon. It's also where Enki lives, and he's one of the head gods too and we'll talk about him some more in the story because he plays a role. Okay so in the Descent of Inanna… so she's going down to the underworld to visit her sister Ereshkigal, who is the goddess of the underworld. I'm forgetting what her name is in Sumerian, it might be still Ereshkigal. But she’s going down to visit Ereshkigal because her husband– Ereshkigal’s husband has died, so Inanna wants to go to his funeral. And before she goes down, she tells her assistant– it's translated as minister in the versions that I looked at– her minister whose name is Ninshubur– I'm not sure about the length of the vowels there, but Ninshubur is Inanna’s like assistant, I'm imagining like a PA. And so Inanna is like “okay Ninshubur, like I'm going down, it's kind of dangerous to go, people don't really go down to the netherworld, so if I'm not back in three days go ask these gods for help.” and she gives a list of gods. First is Enlil, and then Urim, Nanna, and Enki. That's important later because she gives a list of four and it's important that she gives a list of four because the first three don't help her, but we'll get to that in a minute. So Ninshubur is like “okay, great, have a good visit to the netherworld,” and off Inanna goes. So Inanna goes down, she’s stopped by the gatekeeper… and the gatekeeper says “hold up, what are you doing here and why are you here?” And so Inanna says “I'm visiting my sister because her husband died and I want to go to the funeral” and he's like “okay let me go ask her.” So he goes and asks Ereshkigal if it’s okay and Ereshkigal is concerned because before Inanna went down, she got these powers. And the powers are manifest in physical objects. So she gets a ring that has some sort of special power, and this lapis lazuli necklace that has a power, and there are seven other– seven total things, so five other things that have powers. And so Ereshkigal knows that Inanna brought these and she's concerned about them because there's a sort of not trusting dynamic between them even though they are sisters. So Inanna’s like okay you can let her in but close all seven gates and only open one at a time to let her in, and each gate take one of her things. So she goes through it's the same sort of structure throughout, in the Sumerian. And she goes to one gate, they take her ring. She goes to the second gate, they take her hat or whatever. And it goes on for seven gates. And then she gets to the last gate, they let her in, and basically it was a trap. Speaker 0: They… it's kind of confusing. The Sumerian is not really clear on what exactly happens. But I've sent Alana the link to the translation that I looked at, and so you can read it too if you want to see– Alana: That will be in our show notes at ladyhistorypod dot tumblr dot com. Kelsie: Yeah. So I used the version that the… the Electronic Corpus of Sumerian Literature version which is trans– it's sort of a… It's a compilation of some different translations but it's a pretty standard not too fluffy interpretive translation, so I thought it was pretty good. But basically… so she gets the last gate and then they start yelling at Inanna and then she turns into a corpse and they put her on a hook. I'm not exactly sure what the process of these things are, but I’m imagining they're yelling at her and she just sort of like desicates and like dries up and they like put her on a hook. The motivation isn't super clear, I think, and some of the tablet is broken, so there… we might be missing some of the context, of course. And you know, of course, something important happens in a break, that's always the case, it’s never something boring. So maybe there’s some sort of other story, and maybe it's orally transmitted, detailing the drama between Ereshkigal and Inanna. Maybe there's a more specific reason why Ereshkigal does not trust Inanna and therefore wants to take her powers and then trick her to stay in the netherworld. Anyway, so Inanna's dried up, on a hook, and then three days passed and so Ninshubur, you know, being the loyal personal assistant, realizes three days have passed and Inanna’s not back, so she's like “oh shit, I better go get help.” So she goes to the first person that Inanna told her to ask for help from, Enlil. Enlil says “no, I’m not helping.” And then Ninshubur goes to Urim, Urim says “no I'm not helping.” And then Ninshubur goes to Nanna, and Nanna says “no, I’m not helping.” And finally she goes to Enki, who in some versions of myths is Inanna’s father. And in this version he… the wording is that he is her father, but we have to be careful with the wording about like familial relations in Near Eastern text because sometimes they’re just using them to describe power dynamics, not actual biological relations. So even though Enki here is you know referring to Inanna as his daughter, it might just be a power dynamic thing rather than a biological relation. That's not super clear, but in other versions of the story he’s also depicted as her father so I think that's fair enough to go for the narrative. But anyway, he’s like “okay fine I'll help, what is Inanna doing?” And so Ninshubur explains that she went down to the netherworld and is stuck. So Enki's like “okay I have a plan.” So he makes these two figures and these are gonna come up later because these figures are what I'm doing my thesis on. He takes dirt from his fingernail and he makes a kurgarru and in the Sumerian it’s galutera. In later Akkadian is just galu. But these two figures– and I’ll explain a little bit more later when I talk about what I'm doing for my thesis– there are some interesting gender performance things going on with these figures. But right now I’ll just leave them as helpers that Enki makes from dirt from under his fingernail. And he gives one of them a plant and he gives one of them water, and he’s like “okay, go down to the netherworld, and give… you're gonna see a corpse, and it's gonna be confusing, but that corpse is your queen.” So I love that saying, because he's like “you’re gonna see this dead body” so he knows what happened already, which I don't understand how that happened. But he's like “you're gonna see this corpse, give her the water, give her the food, and you'll be okay.” They go down, they give Inanna the water and the plant, and she– I assume like somehow revives. And I’m imagining like a sponge, like they put the water on her and like I said before, like I’m imagining like the yelling like desiccated her, so there was sort of like… like soaking up the water. And so okay… she's like “okay I'm fine now.” So they start to leave, and these two demons stop them, the group of three who are leaving, so there’s five of them now. And they say “well, no one ever leaves the netherworld, so you need to send someone to replace you.” And she's like “okay, who do you want” and they're like “we want your assistant” and she's like “no she's too loyal” and then they're like “we want your manicurist” and she's like “no she's too good” and then they're like “what about your husband” and Inanna’s like “okay sure, I guess.” There's some other stories about her husband Demuzi, that it was an arranged marriage too so Inanna is like not too keen on her husband. But so anyway, so the demons go to take Demuzi, and he's like “oh no, I don't want to go to the netherworld.” So he talks to his brother Utu, who lives in the heavens, and he's like “Utu, turn my limbs into snakes so I can escape the demons” and Utu is like “okay, that sounds like a good idea.” And so he turns his limbs into snakes, and he escapes the demons. And then the last part of the story is really fragmented, so I have no idea what's going on, but apparently Demuzi escapes, and then some other things happen, and then Inanna talks to a fly…  like a bug, a fly, who says “I know where your husband is, we can go find him.” And then apparently the fly helps her– it's broken so it's hard to know and then the story ends somewhere there. But that's the short, sort of humorous version of the Sumerian version of the descent of Ishtar, or Inanna, rather. And then the Akkadian version is a lot shorter, it leaves out a lot of the details of… it doesn't have the story afterward, after they leave the netherworld and the demons are trying to take someone back to replace Inanna, the Akkadian version doesn't have that. One of the notable things but the Akkadian version, I think, and this sort of links into my master's thesis, which I’ll get to in a second, is that when Ishtar, in this case since we're talking about the Akkadian, is stuck in the netherworld, there's a whole series of lines repeated twice or three times where it's like all of the animals and humans aren't having sex anymore. And things are bad. And so that's how they know that something's wrong with Ishtar, instead of the assistant sending people down to help, other people realize that something's wrong, which I think is interesting. And then, you know, then she gets back and it's okay. But yeah. So, to talk about my thesis a little bit. So I'm focusing on a couple different figures in the cult of Ishtar, the main ones I'm focusing on is the assinnu. The assinnu is the syllabic spelling of it in Akkadianin but there's also a logogram which in Sumerian is sagg or sag. That one you see sometimes the other one is urmunis which is literally man-woman. Haley: Fun fact, sag in Farsi is dog. Kelsie: Oh, really? Haley: Yeah. Kelsie: In Sumerian it’s head or like top. Haley: Oh that's fun. I was ready for you to be like wolf. Kelsie: No, it's the same as the Arabic it's kelb, kelbum in Akkadian. Anyway, so I think there's definitely something going on interesting gender-wise with these figures, and so actually I first came up with this topic because I was reading the descent of Ishtar in Akkadian, not the Sumerian version. But my first semester of Akkadian, and my professor was a PhD student and we got to a part where– the part where in the Akkadian version, Ea instead of Enki makes an assinnu. And it's the word assinnu in the Akkadian version, but it’s kurgarru and galla in the Sumerian version, but these are all kind of related. I'm throwing words out, I’ll explain the difference– and also the difference isn't super clear, so if you’re confused between them, everyone is. There's not a clear distinction between these roles that we found in the textual evidence so far. But I was like “okay what's an assinnu” because I never heard that word before, that's not a common word in Akkadian and he’s like “oh, it's like a third gender person” and like that raised red flags in my gender studies brain, I'm like okay like whenever you categorize something as third gender without any other discussion there's something interesting going on there. So I started reading some more about what people had written about the assinnu and it turned out to be pretty gross because as we all know being archaeology students and students of the ancient world, it's all white straight man… cis straight men writing about basically everything and so that's the case with gender as well, unfortunately. And so in all these different translations of texts, the assinnu are translated from everything as like cultic prostitute, to eunuch, to impersonator– all these gross words that I think… one, just really limit the conversation that you could have about gender in these figures because you're placing so many modern assumptions on them just with the single word that you're using, and two, especially words like eunuch and cultic prostitute like there's no textual evidence to support these interpretations anyway. So it's all this secondary scholarly interpretation being placed on these figures where you know there's not many textual instances of them, so it's hard to say what exactly is going on but there's not specific evidence for castration or prostitution. For my thesis I’m basically going through and writing about how the word assinnu and kurgarru and galu and kalu have been translated by scholars, and then going back and seeing like what can we figure out in terms of their gender performance from the actual textual evidence that we have, as opposed to just going to these simplistic, interpretive labels. And my proposition, too, at the end is to not translate words like that because any translation that we have is going to simplify the role of these figures and I think just leaving it in the Akkadian leaves more room open for describing the things that they did and leaving it open because we don't know a lot about them, and just leaving that sort of gray area there instead of just labeling them one thing or another. But yeah so that's what I'm working on for my thesis, and all of these figures are associated with Ishtar specifically. And I think there is something interesting there because of Ishtar’s liminality herself because she's the goddess of love and war and those are two kind of opposite things. And her own gender performance is kind of somewhere in between this binary because sometimes she's portrayed in cylinder seals and things with a beard, and her animal is a male lion, or a lion with a mane, at least. I mean there are female lions with manes too. So I think Ishtar herself has some interesting gender things going on, so it makes total sense that her cultic functionaries, her cultic personnel, also had some interesting gender things going on too. So I'm just trying to figure out what exactly we can say about what's going on within her temple. There’s not a lot of evidence, but just trying to figure out what's going on. Lexi: I love it. I love your thesis. Haley: My mind is blown. Lexi: I really struggled to settle on a lady for this episode because I wanted to do something interesting but I didn’t want my lady to be from the same region as like another lady that was already being covered by one of you in this episode and that's– the regions you are familiar with are the regions I am familiar with because we had the same professors. So I had to branch out of my comfort zone and explore a person I had never explored– well, a god I never explored because this is goddesses. So I did what any sensible person would do and I reached out to my sister– sorority sister, for everyone who's been following along. And I would like to thank my sister Amber for suggesting this lady. It was a very good suggestion. So I'm talking today about Nüwa. Clarification, as always, I do not speak Chinese, so that's the best that it’s going to get but it's probably not totally correct but do with that what you will. I speak Korean, not Chinese. Alana: Have I been Jewish yet? Have we said Sprinklebear McPuss-n-Boots yet? We got to get all three. Lexi: You got them in. We got them in. Nüwa is the mother goddess of traditional Chinese mythology, so you know we know of a lot of other mythologies from other parts of the world and there often is a mother figure… you know, a matriarch among the deities if you know what I mean. So she's that but in China. And her name is made up of two characters, nu which means woman and wa which is a unique character that is only a part of her name, so that's how it distinguishes her from women in general, it's Nu-Wa. And she is the sister and wife of emperor god Fuxi. And Fuxi is the god who created hunting and cooking, which is a fun combo like hunt then cook? Not vegan, but very relevant to each other. She is often depicted as a serpent, and it's her body is the figure of a serpent and she has a woman's head. And she is capable of shape shifting into anything she wants so she can change how she appears. And let me just say she looks really dope, like what a vibe, check out our Instagram, I’ll put up a picture there, or Google her, but I'm obsessed with the different looks that she has. In some depictions she's just drawn as a woman in traditional Chinese dress, which is hanfu and that's slightly less cool but like chill. And in the traditional Chinese creation story Nüwa created humankind from the earth. And we see this in a lot of creation myths. If you know of creation myths from around the world, a lot of times like the physical earth or clay or dirt is related to the creation of humankind. So the story goes that one day she was walking through the woods and she found the woods to be so beautiful that she was sad that she couldn't share the beauty with others. She wanted someone else to enjoy the beauty of the earth. So she decided to create humans from the clay around the river. So she stopped at the riverbank, she picked up the clay, and she's like “I can make humans out of this.” And it is said that she made the aristocracy, like the aristocratic class from yellow clay from the riverbank, and the lower classes were made from mud. And so Nüwa made the upper classes with her hands, she molded them, but her hands got tired and so she picked up a rope and she dipped in the mud, swung it around over her head, and the mud that dropped off became the lower classes. So there is a class distinction in this story, I assume it was at one point in history perpetuated by the upper classes to justify like the class divide in their society but that's how the story goes. And there are several versions that story with varying details so if you are curious to go explore it there are texts about her written in Chinese and Vietnamese and a couple other Asian languages, so if you speak any of those and want to go read it, feel free. But that's the general basic… things that seem to be true in every version of the story. She is credited with defeating the evil water god who is depicted as a black dragon and is named Gonggong, which… I love that name too, like I love the double syllable situation. It's like you could call a pet that, but I guess not since he's an evil water god, maybe it's not good luck to name your pet after him. And Gonggong he’d ripped a hole in the sky when he was battling another god– it was the fire god, so the water and fire god were like [fighting noises] you know? That was not good podcast audio, but they were going at it, him and the fire god. Alana: How am I supposed to transcribe that? Lexi: Ahhh noise! Kelsie: Throw in some vowels and some Hs. Lexi: They were going at it. And they were fighting. And Gonggong ripped down one of the pillars, which is a mountain. He ripped it down, and the sky got a big hole in it. This is a big problem because the sky protected the people from like crazy weather phenomena, so like rain, tsunami, crazy kind of like… crazy crap was happening in the sky. And so she repaired the hole and saved the humans because she loved them because they were her creation, and versions of the story also differ, with one suggesting that she died of exhaustion because she was so tired because she had like held up the sky and put it back together. But she saved humankind, so it was like her last great feat. And another version suggests that she could not repair the sky with just the material she had, so she herself became stone and put the sky back together. So there’s either the version of her dying of exhaustion or her actually becoming the material to repair the sky. Either way, this is her final story so she sacrifices herself to save humankind from Gonggong's mistake. Kelsie: Wait, so with the second version where she is repairing the sky herself is there like an astrological sort of connection to her then? Is there like a constellation representing her? Lexi: That's a good question. No source I read specifically dictated that. Particularly I think because she tends to be associated with the day, but I am unsure. There might be a constellation related to her. She's technically the goddess of marriage and fertility. Chinese religion has really changed over time, but despite that, Nüwa has remained an important figure to many people in China. There are many temples and shrines that are dedicated to her and preserved in her honor, including one that is seen as the ancestral shrine of all humanity, so she's very central in like the identity structure of China. And some women in China today pray to Nüwa for assistance in issues of fertility or marriage, so like if you want a husband you're supposed to go and be like “Nüwa! Give me a man!” and if you want to have a baby, you're supposed to go to Nüwa and be like “Nüwa! Birth me a son!” and so on and so forth. In addition to her role in religion, she also features prominently in pop culture in China and other parts of Asia. She has been a character in three video games, so you can go play Nüwa. I don't know exactly how these video games work, I have not played them. But if that's your jam, Google it. And in numerous television shows and films, there's films that depict all the different stories surrounding her and other deities so she factors into those stories too, and there have been film adaptations specifically of the sky fixing story. And on Earth Day in 2012, a statue of Nüwa created by a Chinese professor was revealed in Time Square as a representation of the importance of protecting the ozone layer because the theme of that year's Earth Day was the ozone layer. And so the ozone layer protects humans and is similar to the sky and Nüwa in her stories… so the statue is of her holding up a piece of the sky… Nüwa holding a piece of the sky…  and she's holding that up and that represents the ozone layer and the fact that we need to keep the ozone layer safe, so as you would give to Nüwa and worship Nüwa you should worship and protect the ozone layer… so on and so forth. Very very cool. And the statue was later moved to Vienna and I've included in the further reading the transcript of the speech that was given when the statue was installed in Vienna which is now where it lives forever, so it's really interesting if you're into that kind of thing. And also I will include a link to the Google Arts and Culture page that describes the statue and you can learn more about the statue and what it's made of if you like that kind of thing and what it looks like. Haley: I was having like a mental identity crisis with who I was gonna pick, and I was on TikTok, of course, scrolling through like just for inspiration. And I came on for my like For You Page. I think that's what it's called, the youths call it, a fun story about Danu and Tuatha Dé Danann. I really… Okay, so this is Irish mythology that we're doing a deep dive into, and I asked Robert how to pronounce these, and of course I forgot. So in Irish mythology, Danu, meaning the flowing one or the divine one who brings all things into being, is associated with both masculine and feminine things which is like right on. However, every time I pick– like, I couldn't decipher like, discern whether she was representation– like if you looked at her while she had her pronouns, or assuming from scholars now she/her pronouns, if she would represent both masculine and feminine or if she is just associated with because she's the divine one who brings all things into being. Because when you look at her it's– I put a lot in the further reading but I used a lot of YouTube videos of the people who are like kinda amateur experts in this… certainly not myself. And a lot of the representation that they put up were very feminine goddess like. Like very nature-esque, flowing long hair, flowing skirts and dresses, or sometimes like a warrior but really like honing in on that feminine side. And that's just my tangent. So she is also like the earth goddess of fertility and growth, abundance, agriculture, as well as intellect, change, and wisdom– and a whole host of others. She just does it all, apparently. She's also like the hypothetical mother goddess of the Tuatha Dé Danann which is what I'm also going to talk about. But before that, because this group of people, the Tuatha Dé Danann, which is Old Irish for the people of the goddess of Danu and the anai– the A. N. A. I. within the name means wealth and that's kind of strange because this… when I'm reading Danu is D. A. N. U. and that’s not found in any like medieval Irish text which was kind of like a point in time where people were like okay it's not in this period and afterwards type of situation. That goes for a lot of her myths and legends. And if you let me nerd out for a sec, let's go into some etymology of the name Danu. Scholars believe that the name Danu is the nominative form and the genitive form is Danann, spelled as like D. A. N. A. N. N. or D. O. N. A. N. D. or D. A. N. A. N. D., which is seen in the primary sources, that’s also how the name Tuatha Dé Danann is spelled. It's the D. A. N. A. N. N., the genitive form of Danu. Again, with these people, they are the people of the goddess of Danu. And this is the story that I'm actually gonna focus on because spoiler it's great and it's also one of the most well known sources, just if you like do a Google search this is the one that keeps popping up with her. And it's about how… basically Ireland was kind of populated. So opening our book to a short story, while there are a bunch of little stories like within this one story, I'm kind of like lumping it all up. And in Irish mythology  Tuatha Dé Danann were the first people or tribe in Ireland. Since they're supernatural and they're not necessarily human but they are human, the way they arrived to Ireland was like via dark clouds and mist which also gets strange because they landed on Connacht. Am I saying that right, Alana? Alana: Connacht. Haley: Connacht. Alana: C. O. N. N. A. C. H. T.? Haley: Yes! Yes ma’am. Alana: Connacht. Yeah Haley: Which is on the west side of Ireland. And this is where– Alana: It's– throwback to episode two, that is around where Gráinne Ní Máille was born and lived and did her pirate-y thing. Haley: Exactly. So this is like why it gets weird, why I say it's like they arrived via dark clouds and mist because they also had boats. So when I was first reading this, I was expecting like people coming out of like dark mist and clouds because clouds are in the sky! But I think now like boats come along with it, so there might be spaceship boats or like water boats. But– Alana: Like in Treasure Planet. Haley: Exactly! That’s what I was thinking. Lexi: Ancient Aliens? The aliens brought boats down and created the Irish people? Haley: NO. Alana: No no no no. Treasure Planet. Treasure Planet is the analogy that we are going with, Treasure Planet. Haley: Yes. And when they arrived, they supposedly burned the boats, hence forcing them to settle in the land they like docked. Which made little to no sense-tentacles, because you literally like, again, rode in like a cloud of mist. And also I want to know when they settled, and they were like “okay, we have food, water, shelter. Let's burn them boats.” And that's fine, that's a great tradition, I'm not like saying for the tradition. But what if, like, if it was immediate, how did you know that was like a suitable habitat? Because like wouldn't you say “oh, we don't have like one of the three basic needs, four, five basic needs that we need, let's get back on our boats and travel around.” These are also supernatural beings and I'm just overanalyzing mythology. That's what I do. Also once they were settled, so like post-burning boats, I guess… It was said that they stayed there for centuries. And for the archaeologists and all of us here part of the myth that is the ring forts, are also called like the fairy forts… Alana is making a face. And that's because that– Alana: I dug a ring fort! Haley: Connection to you and Susan. Probably Susan, why I know this story. So– Alana: This is the Susan Johnston appreciation episode part two. Haley: I actually have a book that she gave me right next to me on my desk, I have with my library background. Anywho, the fairy forts are like often called fairy forts because the Tuatha Dé Danann used them as portals to another like world. And side note, if a human were to happen across the portal they would be forced to dance until they went mad. Honestly, that’s just like… I read that and it was also kind of like– Lexi: What a way to go. Haley: Exactly. Kelsie: It wouldn't take very long for me, like you know twenty minutes I'm gone. Haley: I know! I was like I can dance through like one album of ABBA but like if we get into an album of the Beatles I might like cease to exist. Alana: (Gagging noise) I hate the Beatles. Famously I hate the Beatles. Haley: Rude. And then she is on a podcast with like one of the best Beatles lovers ever. Lexi, right there and then I’m like a– Alana: I hate the Beatles. I think they're overrated. I think it's just like mediocre white men getting more credit than they deserve. Lexi: Well, Sergeant Pepper takes your note and kindly throws it out.The bird. Haley: He took a nice poop on it. Alana: That's fine. Whatever. Haley: Okay so back to my story, because it’s about me right now. We all went mad. And then lastly, this is my last note, so when the Celts invaded, the legend goes that they all turned themselves into fairies, hence, fairy forts! And then they keep watch over the land. That's them. That's Danu. Kelsie: What's the– I don't know if you know this, and maybe I… maybe there’s not an answer, but what's the significance of… between fairies and circles around things? Like when I think of like– like I know about ring forts, I didn't realize there was a connection to fairy forts. But then like winding up like fairies and circles like… Haley: Yeah. Kelsie: Mushrooms, like that’s also a circle-y thing on the ground. Is that a bigger thing? Haley: So, the circle is like the portal, and the reason why it's called fairies is that the legend says they turned into fairies. So it's like fairy forts, that’s their fort. Kelsie: That makes sense. Haley: That's the most I can tell you. I'm sure there's more. There are a lot of YouTubers out there. Lexi: Also, circles is magic. Alana: I'm talking about Persephone the Greek theological figure, ancient Greek. I identify with her very strongly because I also contain multitudes. There is a poem by Nichole McElhaney who is the author of A Sisterhood of Thorns and Vengeance, a book that apparently just like does not exist, because I cannot find it in print anywhere. But the poem goes “Do not worry about your contradictions - Persephone is both floral maiden and queen of death. You, too, can be both.” And I love that. But apparently like the book doesn't exist Nichole McElhaney has a couple of other poetry books with really interesting cool names similar to A Sisterhood of Thorns and Vengeance. She is also known as Proserpina in Rome, and also known as Kora or Kore, which means maiden. And she becomes Persephone when she is like queen of the underworld which we will get to… the stuff that you might know… because of the Percy Jackson series. So in Homer's Hymn to Demeter… Homer's Hymn to Demeter is kind of the primary source we have for the story of Persephone being taken to the underworld. Homer describes her as slim-ankled, which my friend Kay, shout out Kay, who I brought up earlier, we tried to make a religion together, they are an expert in classical literature and they said that that probably meant like a graceful or delicate or something along those lines. So the story is Hades saw her in a field, abducted her, and took her to the underworld and like made her his queen and something about pomegranate seeds, that he forced her only one in Homer’s hymn. It’s only like one seed. You hear it like three or six other places, but in Homer it's just one. Here's what you might not know about that myth, according to Homer. Hades had Zeus’s permission to do this, but not Demeter’s, who is Persephone’s mother. And Demeter goes searching all over like the whole world for Persephone, and everyone saw what happened– like the sun god saw what happened and was like yeah we're not gonna help you because like basically they said she could do a lot worse as far as a husband goes. She's like queen of the underworld right now. I think like that's a pretty good deal… you know Hades isn't going cheating on his wife like someone we know. Zeus. But according to Homer, one pomegranate seed meant three months in the underworld. Anyway Persephone– this is a really short story I'm sorry– Persephone. She is part of the agrarian triad which is a group of three agricultural slash harvest deities with Demeter and a god called Triptolemus. Kelsie: Lexi would call this an agricultural throuple. Alana: That's an excellent point. I don't think there is any evidence for that but I do like the idea of it being a throuple. So Persephone as queen of the underworld kind of gives a more pleasant face to the concept of death and the afterlife, so it kind of like helps Hades’s reputation and there's not as much stigma about it because yeah you're dying but look the goddess of spring is also queen of the underworld, so that's pretty cool. Now I'm going to cede the rest of my time to modern reinterpretations that are all written by women or some other marginalized group. The only one whose like gender I don't know is married to a man and cis straight men don't marry other men by definition, so this person is marginalized in some other way. I don't know if they know that, but it's really cool story. So first of all, Hadestown. Wow. Anais Mitchell. It's beautiful. It's jazzy. It's so much fun. It's Hades and Persephone but they've like fallen out of love after so long and also the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is in there. I want a live recording of it– it's a Broadway show– I want a live recording of it the way that Hamilton has been. I think that is what we deserve. There is also a couple of webcomics, the first one is Punderworld, which has a very– why are you shaking your head Kelsie? Kelsie: It’s such a bad pun and it has pun in the word! Alana: It’s a bad pun and it has pun in the word. It's a very realistic art style, there are not a ton of episodes, one of them made the rounds on tumblr while ago if you were still there. And it takes place in a more realistic like ancient Greek Olympian kind of setting. Links to the webcomics by the way will be in further learning which is what I've been calling it lately because it's not always reading. The other one is called Lore Olympus. There are a lot of episodes of this one. It is more whimsical but also somehow grittier? Like all the characters are kind of color-coded. Athena has a very androgynous, ace, butch lesbian vibe like someone else in the Zoom right now. So it’s like Olympus is a modern city, but the mortal realm is still in ancient Greece. It's really cool, I was up until five AM last night reading it because I just like gave up and was like I just have to read this. Shout out to my friend Em who told me about those webcomics. Also Madeline Miller, who wrote Circe which was an incredible book and Song of Achilles which I haven't read yet, wrote a really cool piece about Persephone several years ago that basically ends with if Madeline Miller were Persephone we would always have winter because she loves pomegranates so much and that is a mood. Lexi: I love that you brought up Percy Jackson because it always bothers me but there are so many cool modern literary takes on a lot of these things but that's the one that had to get famous? Haley: I'm rereading and I finished the Percy Jackson series, forgot how much like I invested myself into it. I think I only read like the first book and like half of the second because I don't remember the third, fourth, fifth but I have the next series which is like… Alana: The Heroes of Olympus or something? And it’s the Roman? Haley: Maybe. I think that's the next one. Alana: I read the first four Percy Jackson books in a weekend, and I would have read the fifth one in a weekend but it was not out yet. Lexi: I was a fan of them as a child. Alana: I was in like fourth grade. Lexi: Yeah probably fourth grade. But my mom decided I was still a fan of them and for my twenty third birthday I asked for a single ticket to go see Hamilton by myself, but for the same price my mother bought four tickets to see Percy Jackson the Musical. Picture this– Haley: Wait, where was it first? Lexi: It was on Broadway. I mean a real Broadway– Haley: They had Broadway? Lexi: Yes. Picture a thirty two year old gay twink dancing around the stage pretending to be a twelve year old boy. Alana: That just sounds like the Percy Jackson Lightning Thief movie. Lexi: Yes. Alana: But with singing. Haley: To be fair Logan Lehrman because I– Alana: Oh, Logan Lehrman is incredible. Lexi: Also, I won't spoil the musical, the musical's gone now it doesn't run anymore, but in case they ever do another iteration and people want to see I won’t completely spoil it. But it is written where there's only a cast of eight people but all the characters are covered by those eight people, and so there are some weird interesting things where that really take you out of the story because like they have to do double duty as characters and all they do to change is like throw on a jacket. Haley: Is it just the first book? Lexi: Yes and no like how the movie was the first book, but like not. You know I mean? Haley: Yeah. Lexi: It's not a truthful direct adaptation. The songs were like “when your dad’s a god, your dad's a god. The one other thing I want to say about it is my brother and I had both for the books as kids and were like okay we'll go see this as like a family thing, whatever. During the intermission, a girl behind us who was probably maybe fourteen or fifteen would not shut up about Percy Jackson to her family and my brother leaned in and was like if we’d come here seven years ago that would have been you. And I mean probably. But to that team who put that on. Lexi: You can find this podcast on Twitter and Instagram at LadyHistoryPod. Our show notes and a transcript of this episode will be on ladyhistorypod dot tumblr dot com. If you like the show, leave us a review, or tell your friends, and if you don't like the show, keep it to yourself. Alana: Our logo is by Alexia Ibarra you can find her on Twitter and Instagram at LexiBDraws. Our theme music is by me, GarageBand, and Amelia Earhart. Lexi is doing the editing. You will not see us, and we will not see you, but you will hear us, next time, on Lady History. Haley: Next week on Lady History, she’s going to blind us with some science. We're doing a deep dive into the women of twentieth century science. Haley: We good. Alana: Amazing.

Term Recap: My reality. 

This is a photo of my desk during the last leg of the term. My room was a mess. The floor was unswept. I was hungry, but I couldn’t stomach my food at all. My laundry was on the floor. I didn’t get to shower for days. Ang hirap. Ang hirap talaga. 

As someone who really values feeling clean, it was mentally difficult for me to experience that, but it didn’t bother me because I was just far gone. 

It’s hard. It’s hard to not have anything else to look forward to after finishing an assignment. It’s hard to draft emails, to professionally beg professors to be a teensy bit nicer. It’s hard to fall asleep and feel guilty for not being able to reply to your groupmates. It’s so hard to go through shit at home while balancing online classes. It’s just hard.

Zoom University was wack. I submitted certain outputs late (but thankfully the professors were accommodating when it came to that), and I scored low on my quizzes. I can easily say it’s my fault for not doing things ASAP but fuck that narrative. I know that I shouldn’t be hard on myself because making it through one class is such a big achievement already. I’m so proud of myself for finishing this term, given my personal circumstances and the current state of my country. The two aforementioned factors really messed with me big time, and I guess this term was just hella eye opening in a personal and social sense, y’know? 

Now, let’s review the term!

Groupworks

I talked about this briefly a month ago, and my sentiments are the same. I think it’s unfair to have so many group activities during this time. You can’t expect everyone to be online simultaneously, especially during a pandemic where everyone has different situations and mental processing capacities. It just felt like I had to respond just because I was online. It’s just difficult to engage with other people you haven’t seen IRL. I don’t know if their tone is mad or if that’s really how they type. Spending time with people IRL is easier because you don’t need to get to know them, but you can always sense what kind of person they are. 

For me, the worst part about having more group outputs than individual outputs is the fact that I cannot take my time with it. These activities brought me so much anxiety because i hated missing meetings and I just hated feeling like I didn’t contribute anything. I can’t get rushed, because I really need to absorb things and go at my own pace; but I can’t do that because other people are relying on me. It’s taxing because I’m the type of person who doesn’t like giving people a hard time. 

I just think it is unfair. My biggest takeaway is that communication is really important. It really won’t hurt to just give your groupmates a heads up if you’re feeling mentally or physically unwell. No need to share, just state it. Easier said than done though, sadly. I just think that it is better than ghosting them all together. AWOL groupmates are not a new phenomenon, and I guess you really can’t help it especially during this time. BUT. People need to remember that while their feelings are vaild, they must also consider the feelings of other people. Again, communicate if you can’t contribute. You guys can work as a team to figure it out. I really don’t understand how people can just ghost others, especially when they justify it by saying they’re busy with acads. 

Sizster, we’re all busy. You took this class. We all have majors too. :(

TLDR: I just hope people have the decency to communicate with their groupmates better. It’s not okay to let other people shoulder the burden. We’re all suffering here. Also, why do professors have so many group outputs? It is just difficult to coordinate now and it really rushes people who have different pacing. I do see the appeal though, connecting with new people and having less papers to check, but I do hope I see less of this next term. 

To learn or to pass?

Speaking of communication,,,let’s talk about professors.

There were instances where my professors were just passive aggressive toward us students. I had a personal instance wherein I just wanted to ask a question, but I was rewarded with a snarky response. (Weeks later, she spilled an explained to a few of us what happened to her, and the TLDR is some student complained against her so she was just taking it out on all of us. LOL. not cool at all in my opinion.). 

I understand that teachers are also suffering, but that doesn’t mean they have to be mean to us too. Especially since we’re not trying to be mean to them.

Ansaya Teh

Come to think of it, the academic workload itself wasn’t the main problem. I spent the past term taking things day by day, most of it I spent in a state of fear. I have been holed up in my room since the start of the term, refusing to interact with my family save my younger sister. This decision has proven to be beneficial for my mental health in the long run, as I really couldn’t handle the toxicity. However, it did come with a downside. I had to make sure that I came out of my room at the right time, so I wouldn’t bump into any of them. At the same time, I had to ensure that I would eat because I really can’t skip meals. There were also times when I had to hold my pee because I couldn’t handle the thought of facing them. Even the sound of their footsteps would irritate me. It was just hard.

One of the worst things about this pandemic is the fact that you can really see the character of other people. I am living with a bunch of selfish and entitled people. People who have no regard for the health and safety of others. People who are so dense to the point that they will justify their actions by saying that #GodisinControl. It’s difficult because these people are seriously not afraid. They claim to do everything to avoid getting COVID yet they still go out almost everyday for non-essential things. My cousin has her PILOT boyfriend over every other fucking day. When I confronted her about it, she said that life is short and she chooses to make memories. But at what expense? Does she not understand how selfish that logic is? What about the people who you can infect? The passengers her boyfriend can infect if he catches it? When will people realize that it’s not cute at all to have this toxic faith in God and toxic positivity.

Anyway, most of this was written a few weeks ago. I’m in a much calmer state now because of the short term break and social media break (and a lot of animal crossing), which was lovely. 

In Conclusion

I have nothing profound to say right now,,, except what the fuck was that?? LOL. I’ll get better at articulating my thoughts. I guess my online term experience was just a side dish, because my situation here at home was just too much. If anything, I’m thankful to have school because I sincerely love studying and learning. It just sucks that there are so many factors hindering that. 

Above all else, I still have hope. I still have hope. I still have hope. 

BIL

Good things - Biden winning the elections and having the first woman Vice President, lavender lattes and chilaquiles at a Cafe w/ Taylor @ 7am (she bought everything too), Texts from Vicky to go hiking and journaling, FTs from my sister in Temecula and random dms from Brittany in Tahoe saying she misses me and my name and thoughts are on her heart (intuition is crazy)

A whirlwind of emotions, bundle of nerves combined w/ sadness, happiness and sense of relief. It’s a weird feeling to have things come full circle and just finally have the time to step back and think, like really think about my recent life choices.

Like I said Taylor woke me up at the crack of fucking dawn to get breakfast we were intending to walk the beach but it was too cold. She had a date planned with a mutual friend Emilio and she wanted me to help hype her up and get ready. It was a good feeling to think about someone else other than my ex for a change and it kept my mind occupied. It was nice catching up with Taylor. We chose her outfit and a housewarming gift, then I went home.

I sat and cried in my shower just about the stresses of my family, my breakup, dropping out of school and taking off time from work at my 2nd job. I felt so emotional and an emptiness ache in my heart. I feel so lost and pained.

The night before my step sister randomly FT’d me (she hardly ever does this) right after I set my positive affirmations in my journal. I was surprised to receive a call from her and she asked me to drive up to Temecula.

We caught up about her life, my breakup, family and her recent updates to her room. I ate pho w/ my step dad, brother and sister which was nice too.

Visited the promenade for scented candles and it was cute to see all the holiday decorations set up already.

I texted my ex (for no reason at all) and she doesn’t respond to my texts anyways. I’ve been left on read for a while now and it leaves me feeling worthless and stupid. Idk why I do it, but maybe it’s a form of self sabotage.

I was supposed to drive back down to SD and go straight home but I got a text to play board games and my friend Alexis’s house in Scripps Ranch.... Right when I walked through the door everyone said “You want to pop” and handed me a pill. I didn’t really think too hard and just did it because I was so sad and I completely disregarded the fact I took 40mgs of propranolol and 20 mgs of lexapro. I’m not sure what the pill was but it was orange. I took a couple shots, sipped trulys and continued to re-up w/ these orange pills. I still don’t know what they were but I didn’t feel so sad anymore and a happy buzzing warmth surrounded my body. I was wearing my mask and social distancing best I could but it’s hard when all I need right now is human interactions. I’m probably gonna get tested for covid again just to be on the safe side.

Anyway - so much for sobriety right? Just kidding.

I drove home in the rain at about 6am from Scripps to Golden hill which is about a 25 minute drive. Knowing my age and circumstances as to why I was making these irresponsible choices out everything into perspective.

Maybe it’s the drugs having me overanalyze but what I’m aware what I’m doing to myself isn’t good but simultaneously I’m dancing with the devil. It’s terrible.

I don’t like where I’m headed and I’m tired of feeling like im drifting and not 100% here. I can’t continue to do stupid shit and expect a different out come you know? I’m too old, too aware and can’t keep making myself suffer.

It’s ironic I had to have substances in order to see the clarity within the mess but when I was surrounded by all these fucked up people it felt like I was in slow motion and could only hear my internal thoughts/monologue. I wanted to be at home, in bed, cuddling at watching movies during a rainy night but instead found my self doing drugs and making bad decisions with strangers.

Hitting rock bottom sucks. Really sucks. Acknowledging that I’m having problems also sucks. I’ve said this once before but I always persevered no matter how bad a situation gets. I’m a smart woman who just happens to have bad coping mechanisms due to low self esteem and trauma and succumbs to her vices. I’ve over came so much though, why am I throwing all my progress away???

Codependency is a hell of a drug. Loneliness and sadness too. Literally engulfed who I was for a minute

It’s the residual drugs I’m on that is completely making me so exhausted I can’t sleep and keeps my mind on overdrive.

Most likely going to have a serious comedown but I’ll take my chances and live with my consequences

I should also eat something it’s been like a whole day

To whoever reads this, sorry I’m a complete shit show and you’ve watched me downward spiral this year - hopefully you’ll stick around for my glow up, rebirth and healing. Dont have a time frame, but it’ll happen .......crossing my fingers

How Will the Fashion Industry Ever Recover?

How Will the Fashion Industry Ever Recover? Last month, the New York Times Magazine published a fascinating story that took a deep dive into the fashion industry. This industry, which once pulsated throughout New York (and other cities) and contributed greatly to its sense of vitality, has been eviscerated by COVID-19. Not only are storefronts shuttered and fashion shows suddenly a thing of the past, but there's no online market for anything other than loungewear because nobody is going anywhere. Writer Irina Aleksander asks, "What happens then?"Her piece, which documents the demise of countless luxury brands alongside the stratospheric success of sweatsuit-producer Entireworld (March sales were up 662% over the previous year), shows that the fashion industry was already in distress, though its cracks may not have been obvious to a casual observer. It was stretched too thin, with too many shows ("a worn-out ritual," in the words of Gucci's head designer Alessandro Michele) and too much emphasis on novelty and not enough on quality. Aleksander explains the crushing concept of R.T.Vs ("return to vendor"), which exists in many contracts between designers and retailers. If a collection does not sell, the retailer returns it to the designer, who's on the hook for the lost revenue. If retailers have to mark down a collection early, the designer owes them for the losses. This makes it nearly impossible to get ahead. Aleksander continues:"In order to protect exclusivity, stores had to commit to even larger buys, ordering more clothes than they could possibly sell. Then, when they couldn’t move the stuff, they’d return it. Thanks to the rise of fast fashion and the luxury market’s simultaneous attempt to keep up with its impossible pace, it all started to feel disposable."Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, describes the current situation as a chance to reset and rethink; it has "crystallized a lot of conversations that the fashion industry had been having for some time," but was unable to act on because "it's so big and there are so many moving parts." (Not to mention the fact that it would be harmful to many designers to mess with the norm that had been established.) Wintour does not think fashion shows as we know them will ever come back. "I think it really is a time where we need to learn from what’s happened, almost about how fragile and on the edge we were all living. And that it wasn’t that solid."Designer Marc Jacobs put it well in conversation with Vogue: "We’ve done everything to such excess that there is no consumer for all of it. Everyone is exhausted by it. The designers are exhausted by it. The journalists are exhausted from following it. When you’re just told to produce, to produce, to produce, it’s like having a gun to your head and saying, you know, Dance, monkey!"To anyone who's been buying, researching, or writing about sustainable and ethical fashion, this does not come as a surprise. Ever since the Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013 that killed 1,134 people and injured more than 2,500, the state of the fashion industry as we know it has seemed precarious. Horror stories of luxury brands like Burberry incinerating its own surplus stock in 2017-18 to maintain brand value underscored the unhealthiness of the business model. Surely it would implode at some point, and COVID sped up that process.But now, looking at the wreckage around us, what needs to change? People will continue to clothe themselves and to shop to assuage boredom and seek stimulation, but how can the industry reshape itself to be better and more resilient? I think a big part of the solution lies in changing the media's messaging. The role of media is profound. The way it shapes stories about fashion has the power to influence millions of people and to shift the sense of what's normal, healthy, and right. I'd argue that media coverage of fashion trends has more clout than the designers themselves, who are somewhat at the mercy of the Internet's interpretations of their work. So if celebrities, influencers, writers, and analysts can start asking new questions about fashion, and making these front and center in their coverage, there's potential to reshape the industry's priorities. So what should these questions be? We Need To Start Asking What We're Wearing, Not Who Designed ItBritish actress Emma Watson, a longtime ethical fashion activist, wrote,"On the red carpet we're often asked not what we are wearing but 'who'. It’s as if the ideas behind the clothes – the label, the designer, the collection – have more meaning than the garment itself. But there’s something missing. There’s a bigger story to be told about the conditions in which our clothes are made, the resources that have been used and the impact they’ve had on communities."Imagine if every writeup inquired about an item's provenance? The labor standards at the factory where it was made? The names, ages, and wages of the people whose hands created it? It's really no different from asking what ingredients go into making newly launched food products.We Need to Start Re-=wearing Clothes and Showing Them ProudlyThis is where online influencers and fashion bloggers can make a real difference. There's a disturbing stigma associated with rewearing clothes, and it's driving production of cheap, quasi-disposable fast-fashion pieces, while also increasing the amount of textiles going to landfill. We have to make reuse acceptable, perhaps even cool, but that will only happen if the people who do it are praised for it by the media, not criticized. [Read: Why You Should Be A Proud Outfit Repeater]We Need to Figure Out a Way to Measure SustainabilityRight now sustainability is treated like a trend, but it needs to be a basic requirement. As Maxine Bédat, founder of fashion brand Zady and the New Standard Institute, an ethical fashion think tank, told Grist recently, "You can’t manage what you don’t measure." Energy, chemical usage, wages, and working conditions are all definable and quantifiable, but doing so has not been a priority up until now. Bédat goes on: "If we’re not actually measuring these things, we don’t know whether we’re making progress or we’re just selling another shirt."We Need to Stop Saying That Some Things Are in Style and Others Are NotNot only could this curb consumption somewhat, which is desperately needed from an environmental standpoint, but it could take some of the pressure off designers, who are scrambling to keep up with impossibly packed schedules. Aleksander's article points out the absurdity of perfectly good inventory becoming devalued as soon as it's from a previous season, but notes that it's an enormous challenge to fix:"The fascinating part is that in order to do that — to give that aged inventory value again — requires literally killing fashion, that nebulous deity that says something is 'in' this year and not the next."We need to get away from seasonal trends and implement new standards for gauging an item's value. We must start admiring clothes for their inherent quality, beauty, versatility, ethical production methods, and comfort, while actively rejecting those that fail to meet those standards. Clothes can still be a tremendous source of pleasure in a post-COVID era, but their consumption must become less about immediate and fleeting gratification, and more about lasting satisfaction. It's a tall order, for sure, but it's not impossible.