Ask 18 A memorable meal this year?

At some point while my fever was high and my mental capacity was low, I decided I hated every food in the house and was going to get something different delivered. I opened up doordash, and got a pop-up notification telling me there was a new Turkish restaurant, and I could get a big discount on my first order from them. So I got Turkish food. I got, in fact, a great deal of Turkish food. Three bags of food, which appeared on my doorstep what felt like seconds after I ordered, tops tied closed and then the bags also boxed in with twine like someone was worried they'd burst (the food was very hot and the bags were very thin plastic. it might've been a valid fear), and by the time I got them open I had completely forgotten what all buttons I'd clicked while ordering.

Falafel and hummus and labni, which are staples for me (the day I realized how easy it would be to make my own labni was like seeing the sun for the first time), but also chicken shawarma (I've had shawarma twice before and it's always a treat) and lahmacun (which I'd heard of and always wanted to try! I've seen it described as Turkish pizza but the dough was rolled so thin and the spread of minced-meat-onion-spice mix on top was so smooth and rich. 'pizza' to me always implies a lot of sauce and cheese and this was not that) and spinach gozleme (a spinach-stuffed flatbread, not quite like any other spinach-stuffed bread I've had before but there is not a spinach-stuffed bread in the world I wouldn't like. it wasn't flaky so much as it just tore beautifully, and there was a lot more spinach than cheese, and it was a little spicy and somehow almost sour? mouth-watering in the most literal sense) and mixed pide (also a stuffed bread but of a completely different style. Almost like if you made a boat of pizza crusts and filled them with. well. I ordered the 'mixed' and I don't know what I expected them to be like? Truly I do not remember making the order. I didn't know many Turkish foods until after I ate these and looked up the stuff on the receipt, so if fever-me wasn't googling while she ordered she may genuinely have had no idea what to expect. But in this case, 'mixed' meant ground beef and egg and thick-sliced smoked sausage coins and spinach and onion, all tucked into the bread together and topped with little cheese curds and some sort of crushed red pepper that was so intensely flavorful I kept picking up just the pepper flakes to eat on their own).

I may have been delirious with fever going into it but honestly the food would've knocked me off this plane of existence on its own. It was magic.

arcanart comms for anternika and herebeedragons respectively. please don’t use if you’re not anternika or herebeedragons

if you’d like to commission me, my art shop is here

#. How do you feel about the windows in your home? Too large, too small, anything interesting to see?

Birds out front, and trains out back!! I love them both, very much. Mostly the rest of the views (behind the birdfeeder in the front yard, and in the back alley between me and the traintracks) are pretty grubby streets, so that's less fun, but the birds and the trains are so so good. The trains come through about once an hour-ish and they're good in every season. The birds are just now starting to come back and I'm so happy to see them! We have a ton of mourning doves right now.

please please please, did the space-monk keep his armies up his sleevies??

Of course he did! 

This is an exceptionally silly title, but in my defense, it’s a nonsense file full of contradictory timeline schenanigans and snippets of a fic I am not writing.  The same fic I’m very very absolutely not writing that I mentioned in the seven-sentence post last Sunday, actually!  It has been plaguing me. 

The thing is, is that I am so sure there ought to be a way to make it work.  I haven’t found it so far, so far I have only found many ways not to make the metaphorical lightbulb, but I feel so strongly that it should work.  I will make it work eventually, and then I will be free. 

The ‘it’ (army up our sleevey) in question:  the Mandalorian Empire!  I am so sure that there should be a way to rewrite these wholeass war stars so that the Mandalorian Excision is a turning point in the history of the Jedi Order, but in the opposite direction from canon.  Have it be the first time the Jedi were commanded to go commit large-scale violence against a sovereign system just because the Republic said to, and so the first time the Jedi found themselves truly pushed to a point where they cannot do as ordered without wholly breaking the tenets of their Order but cannot disobey and keep themselves safe and in a position to fulfil the objectives of their Order—and have them turn to the Force for a third option. 

It's a pretty radical third option, because I want to play with the timeline and also because the one scene makes me so so so happy, but—instead of killing off the Mandalorians, they meet with them, make a deal with them, pack them up on ships, and slide them into a pocket in the Unifying Force to be retrieved (much) later, when it’s safe.  Fast forward all the way to AotC, once the Jedi have discovered the clone army prepped for them on Kamino and received that implicit authorization to hire what amounts to a mercenary army, they can do a fine magician’s flourish and pull the better part of the Mandalorian Empire out of their sleeves!  What a scene that would be, I want it so badly. 

And all the fun of the set-up, too!  Imagine it, right, the Jedi have elevated ‘from a certain point of view’ to a zen art and have a now long-running history of taking creative options to do the most good possible regardless of Republic guidelines, but keeping it all on the down-low has given the Jedi chronically poor PR (essentially the same as they have in canon) and the truth of many things has passed out of memory and into the keeping of the Force.  Then the tragedy at Galidraan happens, Dooku’s faith wavers, and the Force returns one secret to them—Dooku’s good friend Sifo-Dyas gets him together with Master Archivist Jocasta Nu and the three of them learn about the pocket Mandos waiting to be pulled, the absolute proof of how far the Jedi will go (and how much the Force will support them) in order to preserve life.  And then immediately after that revelation is when Sidious comes to whisper in Dooku’s ear, all his manipulations, how the Republic is corrupt and the Jedi are useless and if Dooku wants power enough to make a difference he’ll need to do something radical—and Dooku is playing him the entire time. 

And thematically, it could be so good!  Revisiting the original Star Wars question of are the Jedi knights following lords or monks serving a higher purpose!  The distinction between lying to gain the freedom to do good (Jedi mind-trick) and manipulations to gain power to do evil (Sith compulsion)!  Once-and-future Mandos who are both the kings waiting to return to their people and the sword waiting to be drawn!  The Clone Wars are still fought, kind of!  An Empire still rises, kind of!  The clones who were chattel, produced and sold by a failed Mand’alor, denied any culture or history, destined to fight and die unacknowledged in someone else’s war; now being adopted wholesale by the returned Mandalorian people, hailed as a gift from the Force itself, sharing their knowledge of modern times and being taught all the cultural traditions of Mandalore’s heyday, being treated as beloved children and kept as safe as any Mando’ad could be!  Anakin, fatherless child of the Force, as the prophesied Chosen One, found by the will of the Living Force, trained by a sleight-of-hand master with a powerful connection to the Unifying Force, strong enough to bring balance to the Force not through massacre but instead by bringing back an entire people!  Renewal, healing, proof that good will always ultimately triumph over evil but that you have to get it there through a balanced combination of faith and hard work! So fun!!!!

Exactly how and when all this happens and what the hell all the fallout is, though, all that stuff still escapes me.  This file is an absolute nightmare bog of snippets and bullet-point ranting. 

soft asks 24 with a twist: what do you do when you *are* stressed? Habits and coping

Oh, a twisty question indeed! I'm having to think about how to answer this one. I have pretty variable habits for how I handle different types and levels of stress under different circumstances--actually, probably my very first answer should be Deliberate Action. The more stressed I am, the less I allow myself to run on autopilot or do things without a cause-effect effort-risk-reward analysis, so my actions become more specifically tailored to the situation as I go--but there are some general habits as well. Mostly, singing! I know you're familiar with me walking around singing all the time, but when I get stressed that becomes much more purposeful. I'm really big on advance planning, so when I start to stress, I try to make plans for what could happen, what could go wrong, what will need to be done to prepare or to recover or so on, so forth. And that's super useful, except that I'll keep chasing contingencies down until I've reached the really low probabilities and am really just spiraling, so at a certain point it's really important to get my mind at least partially occupied with something else. And since I'm pretty much always singing anyway, it's an easy thing to focus on--I'll sing songs I'm less familiar with, songs I have to pay attention to, or if I'm even more stressed than that, songs I'm very familiar with, so that I can focus on my breathing while I sing instead. As things calm down and I get more room in my brain, I'll add more complex things--I do a lot of my story planning while I de-stress. Accomplishing things and solving problems really makes me feel better in stressful conditions (which makes sense) and successfully resolving plot points counts! It's very rewarding.

19, 36, 41, 57

19:  Have I ever donated blood?  I have not successfully donated blood.  I’ve tried a couplefew times and always been denied on the basis of either my blood sugar being too low or my veins being too hard to locate, and at this point I just donate change as I walk by.

36:  How good am I at communicating through facial expressions?  This is to some degree subjective, but I’d like to think I’m pretty good at it.  I ranked pretty high when we did the ‘who can tell who is lying’ and ‘who can tell who is guilty’ and ‘who can tell who pulled the prank on the instructor’ games at the criminology club meetings, at least, and I’ve never gotten complaints about the faces I pull when I tell stories.  My eyebrow-raise is nowhere near as skilled as Duncan’s, though, which is a source of great sadness to me. 

41:  Favorite non-chocolate candy?  Hmmmm, tricky.  I like skittles and twizzlers, and I’m a big fan of jelly beans (especially the black ones), but I think maybe my favorite is those mints that melt in your mouth.  Maybe they’re butter mints?  I dunno what they’re called, but I mean the big stripy pillow-shaped ones that are in dishes by the check-out in gas stations. 

57:  Do I like roller coasters?  I cannot convey through text alone how much I do not like roller coasters.  The utter horror and loathing cannot reach you through a virtual medium.  I don’t like going fast and I don’t like big hills or heights, and I cannot stand the feeling of my internal organs separating out of their skeletal enclosures like I’m a sample in a centrifuge.  Absolutely not.  My father made me ride the purple Scooby-Doo roller coaster in the kids’ park at Carowinds once and I thought I’d die.  I rode the Snow White roller coaster with @kaylithographica and @agirlnamedhagrid at Disney World and needed hugs for comfort afterward. 

song post: 5

5 - a song that needs to be played LOUD:  hmm, a tricky one!  I had to think for a long time, because, as you may remember, when I am in the mood for LOUD I just make all songs loud regardless, and I couldn’t think of a specific one that inherently called for LOUDening.  however, Duncan has come to the rescue--we tend to turn Travis Tritt’s “Good Day to Be Alive” up so that we can all howl along when he makes his lone-wolf sound

12, 14, 21, 25, 33, 50(the only correct answer is people), 59, 76, 90

12:  What’s my favorite planet?  Every time someone asks me this question--which comes up so much more often than I ever expect--my brain first says “Ego, the living planet!” and then “Petaybee”, both of which are ridiculous fan-driven responses, and so then what actually comes out of my mouth is “...Saturn”.  Saturn is quite nice.  I like the idea of a planet stuck in a bunch of frozen hula-hoops. 

14:  If I was to live with my best friend in an old flat in a big city, what would it look like?  It would be so pretty, and so full of books and cats. 

21:  Talk about my favorite bag, the one that's been to hell and back with me and that I love to pieces:  My Bag of Holding!!!  I have had three bags of holding over the last--shit.  Decade?  I am old, and my bags are old as well.  The first one is missing a zipper and has three holes in the bottom, and the second one has two holes, and the third/current one is completely intact!  I love them, they have a billion pockets and flaps and they never let me down.  

25:  What's the weirdest place I've ever broken into?  There was an abandoned Winn-Dixie in the middle of nowhere, Union County.  It was...unsettling.  Not so much a liminal space as a possible layer of hell.  There were bugs there I have never seen in the real world. 

33:  What's my fave pastry?  The junior asked this too, and it was so mean.  I think we decided on muffins?  Good sweet-tangy citrus muffins. 

50:  What's an odd thing I collect? I don’t see how ‘people’ is an odd thing, but that is definitely my most serious collection.  Also, I did take a picture of all my knickknacks on the table, so I’ll post that in a second. 

59:  What's my favorite myth?  This is as bad as the pastry question, I swear.  Well, we all know Coyote is very important to me, and I’m fond enough of Persephone stories that I’ve got my own tag for them, but today I’m thinking about Ivan Tsarevich, the Gray Wolf, and the Firebird.  That’s a good myth, right there.  Lots of moving parts. 

76:  Is there anything I should be doing right now, but I’m not?  I should check the mail and do my duolingo, but neither of those things are incredibly pressing. 

90:  Talk about one of my favorite cities:  I was telling Duncan about Charleston earlier (that’s the coastal town in South Carolina, not the capital of West Virginia, in case somehow one of you babes wasn’t sure).  It’s a beautiful city, very comfortable to walk through, and it’s got a pleasantly relaxed atmosphere (especially compared to hyper-professional Charlotte and perennially-harassed Atlanta, which are the two cities I’m generally most likely to find myself in).  Broad boulevards, lovely landscaping and streetfronts, history and that sweet Southern culture soaked into its bones.  Plus, the ocean is right there, the city market is incredible, and I have people close by.  What’s not to love?