#that paper is due friday and the article is just. so boring. i have no idea what to even write. 800 words on that bitch how the fuck??
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You ever have to write a short paper on a material that's just so dry and empty and uninteresting you'd rather give yourself papercuts between your fingers?
#that paper is due friday and the article is just. so boring. i have no idea what to even write. 800 words on that bitch how the fuck??#meanwhile i have another paper due saturday for my cinema class - free subject. i thought of doing a bollywood movie but like -#i don't know enough academically/literary speaking about bollywood to write a paper#so i've been thinking about writing about doctor who bc ya know i can talk about dw all day long#but what aspect? the music was my first thought but there's also more global themes like humanity or hope ....#ugh. i'm just procrastinating.#i think i'm just going to go to sleep now and see when i wake up later what i'm doing (it is 4am after all...)#someone remind me why i decided to go back to university again?#(because i'd rather go crazy writing papers occasionally and attending interesting classes than push papers behind a desk all day long)#rapha rambles#academic adventures#tis the season of finals
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Greetings! I got this idea for danganronpa AU where Nagito is like ghost "living" (or haunting idk-) his old house and the reader moves into that house and they slowly became closer and yk<3
hi i love this concept :)
Request for: Nagito Komaeda
Warnings: nagito’s backstory, slight religious overtones, we breach minor ghost-fucker territory (but no actual ghost-fucking), no-killing game au also
~~~
The house itself was rather nice. Nothing too luxurious for who the previous owner was aside from the obnoxiously fancy chandelier hanging in the den.
The realtor was hesitant to explain that the reason it was selling so comically cheap was, in fact, due to the belief of a ghost. Not just any, however. It was the previous owner’s ghost.
People who even stepped into the house could feel his chilling touch. Hear quiet, shaky whispers in the night. The fireplace would crackle and burst to life at strange times with nobody near it. Visitors and almost-buyers alike would thrust their warnings to stay away upon anybody who so much as looked at the home.
But that didn’t matter much - a house was a house and it’s not like the ghost was malicious from description. Just… annoying. Perhaps a little eerie, but again, not harmful. Everybody escaped without physical injury. So, why not buy it?
Maybe the ghost just needed a friend? Death was probably a lonely time.
Bought on Tuesday. Moved in Wednesday. Finished unpacking… still pending.
It’s not like (Y/n) had anybody to impress anyways. She’d made the move for a fresh start; new faces, new stories.
The bumps began on Friday.
Sometimes they were taps. Sometimes crashes followed by the gentle rapping against the walls, as if to apologize for the loud noise.
She’d stayed through the month, undeterred by any of the ghosts’ activities.
Then the happenings seemed a little more… intimate.
A photo slowly sliding out from beneath the fridge, at first.
Three people in frame. From left to right, there was a figure with shoulder-length pink hair and a smile to make the heavens jealous - then white hair to rival a cloud-marshmallow love child, skin sickly pale and body wastingly thin - finally, brown hair with an ahoge sticking out like an antenna and posture that almost made him taller than the one in the middle. Well, not really, but attempting counted, right?
“Which one’s you?” she asked the air, whether she was too tired, or simply didn’t care enough, to be embarrassed was irrelevant.
A single droplet of water, from a leak she didn’t know existed until this very moment, fell from the ceiling before splotching over the face of the one in the middle.
“White hair, heavy eye bags?”
There was no response, but she took it as a yes anyway. What a pretty, pretty face. In a tragic way.
Because he did look rather ill. Frail build and purple hues under his eyes. Pretty but suffering - it made her feel bad. Of course, she already knew he was dead, but even so - suffering should always inspire empathy rather than romance.
And again, he was dead, so the likelihood of a romance between them anyway was slim to none. None. Unless she suddenly dropped dead, there would be no sweet kisses in the morning or gentle hugs from behind as one of them makes dinner. Maybe when she died, he’d be available for a ghostly date while the house gets put back on the market.
(Y/n) chuckled at the sudden thought of lightning cracking into her home, despite the sunny weather, and striking her dead where she stood. Ridiculous, but God liked ridiculous things.
The sudden thought hit her - what if that old photo was old old? Maybe he was eighty when he died and she just subconsciously signed herself up for a date with an elderly ghost?
Shaking her head, (Y/n) scolded herself for the thought. She’d already be dead by then, it wouldn’t matter what age he was...
Then, it was the scribbling on spare papers. Always specifically spares. Double copies she had put in recycling. Scraps. Even on the backs of paper-esque trash. It was an oddly considerate move for a ghost, though to be fair, she’d never met a ghost before and couldn’t tell if it was out-of-place or not for them.
The words always appeared when she was out of the room. Leaving to grab something and coming back to find the out-dated schedule for work out of recycling and on her desk with crayon sprawled over it.
Hi
Eloquently said, in her opinion.
“Hi?” she looked around the room, “Can you not talk? I thought people said they heard whispers…”
A bang in the other room drew her out. When there was nothing out of place, she returned to her desk only to be met with more words.
I’m Nagito Komaeda :)
“Dodging the question, huh?”
The process repeated. Bang. Nothing out of the ordinary. Return. New words.
Sorry :(
“Don’t apologize,” (Y/n) shrugged off before moving to her computer, “I’m just gonna look you up.”
A series of bangs - now that she truly listened, it sounded like a fist pounding to the drywall - resonated through the home. She did not get up nor did she pause her actions of Googling the man known as Nagito Komaeda.
Until a piece of paper flew in from the open door.
Bad idea
“Probably, yeah,” she huffed, moving back to her computer.
Nagito Komaeda, born April 28th, first popped up as the sole survivor in an old plane hijacking report. Both parents, all plane staff, and the hijackers left dead after the plane crash caused by a meteor strike. Then he came up as a survivor of an old serial kidnapper/killer. Then as a boy who’d inherited the entirety of his parents’ fortune and won a large sum from a lottery ticket he’d found in the trash bag he was stuffed in by his kidnapper. Then as a Hope’s Peak graduate under the title Ultimate Lucky Student.
Finally, as a 25-year-old man who’d miraculously survived ten years post-diagnosis with frontotemporal dementia and advanced lymphoma before his death.
“Holy shit,” she nearly choked on her own shock, “You weren’t boring, that’s for sure.”
Another paper, this time written in marker as if he could sense that she didn’t wish to get up. Another strangely considerate move.
Thanks
You’re not creeped out?
“I mean, it’s more sad than creepy,” her eyes scanned over a single line in the article once again.
“Nagito Komaeda, after all his fortunes and misfortunes alike, died at age 25, after ten years of illness, surrounded by friends who took the place of family. Out of respect, no interviews were conducted, but anybody, anyone at all even from a quick glance, could tell - Nagito Komaeda will surely be missed.”
Her eyes watered slightly as she clicked out of the Togami Publications, laughing at the pure awkwardness of her situation, “Oh my God, that’s really fucking sad. I’m sorry your life sucked.”
Another paper.
It’s fine
I was just wasting space anyway :)
“No, you were- “ she gestured to her computer screen before covering her eyes in shame of her tears, “You meant so much to your friends.”
She expected memorial posts, maybe not as many as there were, but she saw them coming. What she didn’t see coming, however, was that each and every one would be dearly heartfelt - not a single one was disingenuous or vague in the slightest. She also didn’t see herself crying by the end of her little search.
But there she was.
Something light floated into her lap. A tissue.
“Oh my fucking God,” (Y/n) choked up again, picking up the tissue with a small smile, “Stop, you’re a ghost, you’re supposed to be scary and making me leave, not helping me dry my tears…”
Another paper atop the slowly growing pile.
Was that a ghostphobic remark?
“Oh, I’m keeping that one,” she stood, sniffling as she wiped away her tears, and picked up the last paper, nodding to herself as she muttered, “Yep. This one’s going on the wall.”
~~
Nagito stopped whispering because people ran when he did. His voice was always hideous, he didn’t to be reminded. Besides, (Y/n) seemed to prefer the paper method - she hung up her favorites along the walls of her office and if a visitor teased her about it she would ignore them. It was admirable, how their grins and giggles rolled off her back like water droplets over a duck.
He wished he could be like that.
Could have been.
He still had trouble with that.
Has.
Nagito looks up from his spot at the kitchen table where (Y/n) was cooking for herself. She seemed so at-peace in this house, and he’s glad for that. He never liked living alone and everyone else seemed to hate having him there. Not that he blamed them much.
Even so, he much prefers (Y/n) over any past guest as his living counterpart of the house.
She even leaves chairs open for him at the table; he smiles widely at the thought, patting his thighs and kicking out his legs in his seat- just like now!
She’d pulled out the chair upon entering the kitchen before calling out for him that she’d be cooking. She even knew he liked watching her cook!
It was selfish of him to crave so much attention, but in the end, Nagito was already dead so… did it really matter when he indulged in his wants more than he should?
Divine punishment isn’t real and he likes being around her, so why should he bother hiding himself away in the attic?
(Y/n) moved around the house with little to no liveliness, it made him chuckle. Her shoulders drooped and footsteps heavy, it was fun. To feel like he wasn’t alone.
He hoped she felt the same. That he was a friend… or, undead companion?
He hoped she would stay and not move out.
He hoped they could be real friends one day… if it’s not too much to ask, that once she dies, she’ll meet him. The real him.
That would be heaven.
#nagito x reader#nagito komaeda x reader#anon chatter :)#x reader#oh to have a polite nagito ghost you can pull out chairs for and look up his tragic backstory
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Modern Love, 1/12 (Branjie/Scyvie/Ninex) - Ortega
fic summary: Brooke Lynn is a 23 year old graduate writing boring, uninspired pieces for the fashion department of a newspaper and living in a city all her friends have moved away from. Silky is living at her parents’ house and spends her days applying for jobs she’s promptly rejected for. Nina and Monet are struggling through their first year as teachers whilst being sickeningly adorable girlfriends. Akeria is pursuing her dream of being a badass lawyer, even if her master’s degree is slowly crushing her soul. Plastique is acting like the second coming of Paris Hilton, so nothing there has changed. Scarlet is overworked and Yvie is underpaid and their relationship isn’t all it appears from the outside.
And Vanessa? Vanessa is nowhere to be seen.
(A story about a holiday, a breakup, friendships and relationships in a post-graduate world, careers, navigating life after university, figuring out what it means to be an adult, and coming to terms with the fact that we really are not nineteen forever.)
a/n: welcome to the sequel to Not Nineteen Forever!!! i should say it’s not *~ mandatory ~* to have read the original before this but it’s encouraged huehue xo hope u enjoy and please feel free to reblog, like and send love!!
***
Brooke felt the all-encompassing sense of dread wash over her as her alarm went off, the sounds of the radio that were gradually fading in doing nothing to make the experience of waking up for another day of work any more palatable. She groaned loudly as she stretched, her arms flying out to the side and hitting the edge of the double bed. Brooke starfished a little, stretching her legs out as long as they would go and trying to put off getting up and showered for as long as she could.
Rolling over in bed she reached for her phone and stopped when she saw the rose-gold rectangular frame beside her on the bedside table. It caught her by surprise every day, almost a sort of routine in itself. A picture of her and Vanessa from when they first moved in, standing at the doorway having just popped a bottle of champagne. Brooke’s face was in a funny contorted sort of smile as she yanked the cork out of the bottle and Vanessa was clapping her hands in excitement, a brilliant white moonbeam painted across her face. Brooke remembered the day well. Monet had taken the photo with Nina beside her, both of them still in their work clothes after they’d visited straight from a hard day full of teaching. Akeria, Silky, Plastique, Scarlet and Yvie had all been inside, shuffling through the huge variety of Domino’s pizza boxes that had just arrived at their door like a deck of cards. That night had been so special. Whatever had happened since then, Brooke would probably treasure that memory forever.
In spite of herself she smiled as she looked at the photograph, then turned her attention to her phone screen.
No notifications. She didn’t know why she expected anything more.
With a cloud over her head that matched the ones in the uncharacteristically grey June sky, Brooke brushed her teeth and peeled her pyjamas off before stepping into the shower and adjusting the dial to somewhere between tepid and warm. Vanessa’s shower gel sat in the corner, the tropical fruit and mint one with little tiny sloths all over the front. Brooke found herself hurting as she looked at it, still loath to use it as she took her own from the opposite side and splatted a huge dollop into her shower puff. Sometimes she used it indulgently, like a secret she shared with herself. She didn’t know whether she’d buy more when it ran out. That was something she still needed to think about.
Once she was clean Brooke briskly dried herself with a towel, sitting on the edge of the bed wrapped in it as she carefully blow-dried out her hair. She picked out her outfit: smart black work trousers with a fabric belt that pulled her in at the waist, a black and white patterned shirt, black stiletto heels. As she painted some minimal makeup on her face in the hope it would make her look less like a sleep-deprived zombie and more like she had her life together in some way, Brooke checked the clock and cursed as she realised she was running behind.
Leaving lipstick for the moment, she grabbed her bag, shoved her feet in a pair of black pumps, and left hurriedly for the train. Breakfast wasn’t a priority; she knew she could grab an iced coffee and a croissant from the cafe in the station in between changing trains, as it took her two to get into work. It was times such as these that she wished she knew how to drive like Monet, Plastique and Akeria, or had learned since uni like Nina or Scarlet. But then again, cafe food for breakfast was one of the very few perks of public transport.
Brooke eventually arrived at the huge concrete block with windows that held her offices, taking the elevator up to the fifth floor, clocking in, shooting a lacklustre “hi” to the girls she sometimes chatted to and settling herself in at her desk. As office positions went, Brooke supposed it wasn’t awful- it was beside the window looking out onto the streets of the city below and it provided some much-needed light to her day. Logging on to her work laptop, she checked her emails (one from her boss about the article due for Friday, and one from Cheryl about money for flowers for somebody going on maternity leave that she’d never met or heard of and might not even have worked there).
Her working day had started.
University hadn’t prepared Brooke for graduate life. It hadn’t prepared her for the fact that friends moved away for jobs and houses and flats, internships and apprenticeships and postgrads and masters. It hadn’t prepared her for the fact that her group chat, once flooded with about a hundred messages if she so much as left it for five minutes, gathered dust as everyone’s lives took over. It hadn’t prepared Brooke for the feeling of missing out on something…Christ knows what. Perhaps living, making memories instead of simply swiping through ones already made on a Saturday night spent alone in bed with a bottle of wine to herself. It hadn’t prepared her for the yearning, the regret at having taken those days for granted when they were the happiest of her life and she hadn’t even realised it. If Brooke had known how soul-crushingly boring her life would be once she got that rolled-up piece of paper in a little tube she would’ve been dragging the girls out every single night. The all-encompassing sadness and longing for something better hit her harder on days like these, sepia ones with big clouds that hung ominously in the sky but never gave her the satisfaction of raining. She supposed that feeling had only been exacerbated by…
She didn’t need to remind herself of that.
It was ten o’clock in the morning and Brooke was staring out of the small office window stupefied with boredom when her phone vibrated. She jumped, pouncing on it as she always did whenever a notification went off. Her phone hadn’t been on silent for a full month. It hadn’t been the person she’d wanted or expected, but it was a pleasant surprise nonetheless.
Silk: HEY GIRL LONG TIME NO SPEAK! I’M GONNA BE IN TOWN THIS AFTERNOON FOR AN INTERVIEW BUT I’LL BE FREE AFTER AND I’VE GOT A COUPLE HOURS TO KICK ABOUT UNTIL MY TRAIN. YOU WANNA GRAB DINNER? XXXXXXXXX
Brooke frantically made plans as if she was under a time limit, as if the moment would slip through her fingers like sand in an hourglass. She suggested some restaurants that she knew wouldn’t eat into either of their fragile graduate salaries and they settled on an Italian in the city centre, where the portions were big and the meals were tasty.
Brooke spent the rest of the day looking forward to meeting her friend. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Silky. Maybe it had been as long ago as New Year. Brooke smiled as she remembered the occasion; all of them cramming into Scarlet and Yvie’s flat to see in the year. Silky and Akeria had got too drunk off prosecco and screamed along to JLS, Scarlet and Yvie had both made a buffet to rival a hotel’s, and Nina, Monet, Vanessa and Brooke had all been tangled up in an almost relationship-ruining game of Articulate. Plastique had brought her new girlfriend Naomi to introduce to everyone and the girl had looked ever so slightly alarmed by the sheer chaos of everyone put together, but she’d laughed and joined in all the same.
That had been another happy memory. Those seemed to be hard to come by these days.
Work dragged. It always did. Brooke managed to write three sub-par articles that she sent to her editor at the end of the day anyway because hell, it was their job to turn carbon into diamonds. So when she hopped on the train back into the city, Brooke felt a little buzz in her veins that she hadn’t felt in a while.
It took her until she saw Silky standing outside the restaurant- hair in a bun full of flyaways, eyebrows still Sharpied on, in a pair of smart trousers and a floaty top- that Brooke realised that part of the reason she was so excited was because she’d been so lonely for such a long time. Well, only really a month, but it felt like a year. It had taken her living on her own to realise just how boring her life was without all her friends so constantly part of it, and now they all had their own lives and schedules it only served to show Brooke how empty her own was without…
Well. Without her.
As soon as Silky looked up from her phone and spotted Brooke her face lit up, and she fixed her with a smile and a screech that Brooke never thought she would have missed hearing but by God, she had.
“BROOKE LYNN!” she screamed, followed by lots of squealing and babbling as she wrapped the taller girl in a tight hug and refused to let go for at least twenty seconds. Brooke didn’t mind and she found herself clinging back, Silky suddenly the loudest anchor she’d never known she needed. When Silky finally pulled away she grabbed Brooke by both wrists, shaking her back and forth a little. “Oh my God, BITCH! Oh my God. FUCK! It’s so good to see you. How the fuck are you?”
Brooke appreciated that- Silky asking how she was. Yvie tiptoed around Brooke’s feelings when they texted and Brooke tiptoed around her and Scarlet’s perfect domestic bliss, both of the subjects too touchy for Brooke and the pair of them instead choosing to communicate via meme. Nina barely had time to breathe these days let alone text back, and Plastique…well, Plastique wouldn’t get it.
None of them would, she supposed.
“I’m…I’m surviving! I’m being an adult, I guess, and this is what life is now. How’re you?” Brooke swiftly moved the conversation on, and Silky took the hint and dropped both her wrists, pushing open the door.
“I’m on cloud fuckin’ nine girl. C’mon, let’s get some vino an’ I’ll catch you up on the world of Ms. Ganache! Think of it as a free episode of the reality TV show that is my life.”
“Let’s be real, Silk. If anyone’s life’s like a reality TV show right now, it’s mine,” Brooke raised her eyebrows, not quite committing to her own attempt at being lighthearted and instead couldn’t have sounded more bitter if she’d eaten an entire lemon with its rind on.
Silky, for her part, shrugged and let out a small sigh. “You ain’t wrong, girl, you ain’t wrong. But the offer of wine still stands, so let’s get sat. Where the damn hell is a waiter?”
They eventually got shown to their table and the conversation flowed frantically and excitedly, mirroring the wine. Silky filled Brooke in on every last detail of her life- most importantly, Brooke thought, was that Silky’s parents who she was back living with had adopted a cocker spaniel puppy called Pooch. Graduate life had been tough on Silky; she still hadn’t managed to get a job and so therefore couldn’t afford to rent a flat, so she’d moved back to her sleepy and uninspiring hometown. Living with her parents, she’d groaned, was beginning to chip away at her; the constant pressure they put on Silky to find a job, move out, get a boyfriend, and lose weight was beginning to grow wearing in the extreme, and Brooke didn’t blame her for being fed up.
“You know you’re always welcome to come chill at mine, you know. If it’s getting particularly rough,” Brooke suggested not-quite-casually, glad of the fact that loneliness didn’t have a scent because if it did she’d be reeking of it.
Silky gave a bashful smile, looking down at her half-eaten plate of spaghetti bolognaise in front of her. “You’re a doll, B, but you know I can’t do an hour on the train any time my Mama tuts at me buying a size XL of anything. In fact therapy’s probably cheaper than a train ticket here but realistically I don’t got the money for either, so…thanks, but in the words of Simon Cowell, issa no from me.”
“That’s okay. I get it, Mums are simultaneously the worst and the best people,” Brooke pulled a face. Thinking about her Mum made her wonder when the last time she texted her was. She felt a little ashamed for not knowing off the top of her head. “But hey, at least you got that interview, right? How did it go?”
“Alright,” Silky muttered in a non-committal way. It was the most un-Silky response Brooke thought she’d ever seen her friend give. It was weird and unpleasant; the Silky from uni would’ve yelled the place down about how she’d aced it, how they’d make her the chief editor right there and then, how she could write an article for them entirely in Wingdings and it’d still be the best thing they’d read all day.
Seemingly picking up on Brooke’s discomfort, Silky gave a small laugh. “I don’ know, boo…I used to be so sure of myself, I used to be so set in the fact that writing was somethin’ I was good at. When I was a kid I used to write these fuckin’ huge stories…pages an’ pages long that my teachers would pull big overexaggerated smiley faces at an’ squeal over an’ put big glittery star stickers on. I thought I was somethin’ special. An’ then uni, y’know…I was a small fish in a big pond- hell, a big fish in a big pond- but I still thought I was the shit even when I got bad grades. I thought my markers just didn’t get it, that they were the ones that were wrong. But now it’s like…”
Silky heaved a sigh and put her fork and spoon together neatly on top of her half-full plate. “…I can’t even get a job at a fuckin’ local rag, so why the hell am I even tryin’ with the big city offices?”
There was something about it all that made Brooke’s heart break all over again, the way that life after uni had worn Silky down to the extent where she didn’t even know if she was good at anything any more, didn’t have much visible self-worth left. Silky had always been the heart and soul of their group; she, Akeria and Vanessa, and in the time it had taken between now and graduation Akeria had become the polar opposite of Silky- so completely embroiled in her quest to become a barrister that she barely had time to reply to any of them any more.
And Vanessa…well. She knew where Vanessa was. Or rather, she didn’t.
Greece was a big country.
“You’re trying because you’re Big Silky Nutmeg Motherfucking Ganache,” Brooke said with a determination she’d not felt in a while. “Come on Silk, you’re you. If grad life has broken you then what the fuck hope is there for any of us?”
( Any of us sounded better than me , Brooke thought.)
“Kiki’s doin’ okay for herself,” Silky shrugged, her downtrodden tone counteracted by the way she picked up her fork again and twirled a single strand of spaghetti around it, eating it once she was finished speaking.
“Kiki’s vagina-deep in a hellish and all-consuming masters degree that’s probably eating her up from the inside out just as much as everybody else’s jobs are. I mean, are any of us doing anything we actually like?”
“Nina an’ Monet? They’da quit by now if they hated teaching so much.”
“Nina West would join the fucking scientologists and stick it out just so she could say she didn’t give up. She’s the final boss of the term mama didn’t raise a quitter . They’re having a hard time, Silk. We all are. It’s just tough because we’re all so busy and shit at keeping in touch that everybody thinks each others’ lives are perfect but…they’re really not.”
“Yvie and Scarlet seem pretty happy.”
Brooke’s face took on an involuntary look of distaste, so irritated and bitter was she at the image of them and their perfect flat and their perfect jobs and their perfect coupley life. “They’ll have something up, nobody’s life is that perfect. Maybe their relationship’s secretly falling apart or…something, fuck, I don’t know.”
There was a beat of silence in which Brooke finished the last little pocket of tortellini she’d ordered and Silky twirled another mouthful of spaghetti around her fork. She chewed, then shrugged thoughtfully, her head tilting a little. “Y’know we should go on holiday. Fuck all this shit off for a week, get away from it all.”
Brooke’s eyebrows raised in appreciation of the idea. She and the girls had never been away together before and the prospect of lying on a beach doing absolutely nothing under the blazing sun was an inviting one. “What, a girls’ trip? Like in Sex and The City?”
“Mhm. ‘Cept we go on an all-inclusive to the Med ‘stead of Mexico ‘cause ain’t none of us can afford that shit.”
“Except Plastique.”
“True. Fuck that bitch. She could prolly buy Mexico.”
Brooke laughed and for the first time in a good few months she felt a little flicker of excitement lick at her heart, so much so that she could see her pulse race at her wrist. She couldn’t stop the smile that spread across her face. “Oh my God. I’m so in. Let’s do it.”
“We have to get all the girls on board, though. Otherwise there ain’t no point.”
“Definitely. Where should we go? Spain’s always good.”
Silky had her phone out and was typing furiously. She paused as something presumably loaded, then her face lit up. “If we go the week after Nina an’ Monet finish up school for Summer we can get flights to Crete for £20 return.”
“Twenty, what the fuck? That can’t be right,” Brooke screwed up her face in disbelief, and Silky cocked an eyebrow at her as she showed her the proof on her screen. Conceding, Brooke shrugged. “That’s so good. I don’t want to know what that plane’s like though. They probably just stuff you all into a tin can and ping you into the air with a giant rubber band.”
Silky howled with laughter and thumped the table so hard that the wine sloshed about in their glasses, little tiny red tsunamis. As Brooke snorted in response purely to Silky’s own mirth, a small thought set off a little drip of dread that threatened to put out the excitement that had only just begun to burn in her chest.
“Where is Crete again?”
Silky let out an unimpressed breath from her nose. “Bitch, you got all the geography skills of a Love Island contestant. It’s just off the Greek coast. Kinda near Turkey too, but it’s Greece.”
Brooke felt her heart drop, Alton Towers Oblivion all over again. She blinked quickly, tried to hide her discomfort. “Well, we’re not going there.”
Silky gave a small sigh, a little hint of resignation or long-suffering to it that Brooke didn’t appreciate. But when she reached over the table and patted her hand on top of Brooke’s, she felt a little bit more understood, a little bit more validated.
“B, Greece is a big place.”
It was the exact same thing Brooke herself had thought earlier, except now it didn’t seem true. Now, with the prospect of going there, it seemed like the tiniest microcosm of society. The world was simultaneously too big and too small, and Brooke felt the cold drip in her heart get worse. “Silky…”
“Look. We ain’t exactly gonna pick the same place she’s at, are we?”
Brooke put her head in her hands and sighed. “She’s not there anymore.”
“What?”
“I phoned the hotel a week ago to try and speak to her. I was going to fly out, try and talk to her and fix things. They said she didn’t work there anymore. So I don’t even know where she is at all.”
Silky huffed, frowning and concerned. “I’m sorry, Brooke, this shit must’ve been hell.”
“You’ve got no idea.”
There was a pause as Silky pushed her food around her plate. “Crete’s small, but it ain’t that small. We still got a one in a million chance of bumpin’ into her if we go.”
“That’s still too small for my liking. Both the island and the chances.”
“Aight, one in a billion. Trillion. Point is, it ain’t gonna happen. An’ besides…” Silky waggled her eyebrows, flashing her phone screen at Brooke again. “Twenty pounds for the first week of the school holidays. This shit’s like gold dust.”
Brooke smiled slowly in spite of herself. Maybe Silky was right. And maybe it would be fun to swan around Greece, eat seafood and pretend to be in some knockoff version of Mamma Mia. Scratch that, it would be fun. She’d get to spend a week surrounded by her friends in the sun, which was what she badly needed at the moment.
Brooke was nodding before she knew it. “Okay, fine. Crete it is.”
“YES, bitch!” Silky cheered, loud enough to be heard by the entire restaurant and possibly the chefs in the kitchen too. “Now let’s get dessert. All this wine needs soaked up by a big slice of sticky toffee puddin’.”
It was easy to feel optimistic with Silky back being her loud and just-the-right-side-of-obnoxious self, and with a plate of tiramisu in front of her. But after they’d finished up, paid their bill and she’d hugged Silky goodbye at the train station, Brooke found the endorphins wearing off as she got back to her dark flat and into her cold bed. Maybe it was because she was finally coming down from the high of meeting up with a beloved friend, maybe it was because she knew she had another monotonous, greyscale day of work to get through tomorrow.
Or perhaps, Brooke thought as she turned over in bed, caught sight of the familiar rose-gold frame and blew it a kiss, she was simply missing her girlfriend.
If she could even call Vanessa that any more.
#rpdr fanfiction#s11#modern love#ortega#n19f#branjie#background scyvie#background ninex#lesbian au#angst#brooke lynn hytes#vanessa vanjie mateo#silky nutmeg ganache
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yan yu
rating: m
genre: romance, fluff, comedy, wayv being absolute crackheads
word count: 1.5k +
pairing: reader x wayv
pt. 6
“okay, sure, has the osaka part of the report been sent in yet? the editors need it by friday, also can you get me an estimated time for the cover photo and staff member list?”
you roll your eyes as your manage asks you a multitude of questions over the phone due to the change in arrival.
“yes i sent in the report yesterday and the cover photo will be taken on the last day. everything’s fine, don’t worry i got this.”
you hear her huff through your phone.
“okay that’s great. i read part of the preview you sent over last week and it seemed pretty good. keep up work like that and the report will be trending in no time.”
you nod into the phone.
“listen,“ you start, “ i was wondering. what would happen if maybe i covered wayv in a not so unrealistic light. what if i focused more on their struggles and issue with their company-”
“y/n” your manager snaps, definitely upset. “if you do that you’re fired. do you hear me? we don’t need our company getting shit on by sm or their fans because you wanted to have some political coverage to make you feel authentic or whatever. if i see anything like that i’ll fire you right on the spot. i swear to god.”
“okay i’ll take that as no. nice talking to you as always.”
“you too” she responds flatly.
she hangs up a second later and you pocket your phone, ready to go out.
you try to push probably being fired from your job out of your mind and enjoy the day.
wayv was at the studio again today, practicing their choreography and finishing lyrics. you wanted to get more coverage on the process for the report so you decided to go as well.
the boys left earlier in the morning than you, and not wanting to wake up at 6:30 to sit in a cold practice room, you had declined.
you go to the cafeteria and get a latte and bagel for your breakfast. you tuck the bagel in your purse for later and walk out the front exit of the building to get to the bus stop.
it was cold while waiting for the bus so you put on your hat to keep warm. the bus came fifteen minutes later and you gladly boarded, taking one of the only empty spots beside a girl that looked about your age. the bus took off with a jolt and you leaned back into your seat sipping your vanilla latte.
“hey i know you!”
you look over at the girl surprised, you didn’t think you knew her.
“you were in my vocal class senior year!”
you inspect the girls face more thoroughly. her sloped nose and clear skin jogged your memory.
“ohhh i remember you! you’re nene, the one who sang adele for their final exam.”
(not very well if you recall correctly)
“ya! that’s me!” she responds cheerfully while looking you up and down “and you sang....”
“i didn’t.” you reply embarrassed, looking past her at the highway falling behind the bus window.
“riiight, that was when you ran out of the exam and threw up in front of the science classrooms!”
you nod desperately trying to forget when you were too nervous to perform and vomited in front of your classmates.
“then the principal came but you wanted to come back and-”
“how’s the singing going now?” you cut in, slightly annoyed.
“oh great!” she replies with perfect teeth and rosy lips.
“i’m still doing auditions but i have a feeling something big is coming my way. plus i’ve already achieved something better!”
“what’s that” you reply, losing interest in the pretty girl from high school that you remembered was also quite boring.
“i’m dating a celebrity!” she yells.
everybody on the bus slowly turns to look at us, mostly annoyed at us being loud. you shrink down wanting to disappear from this conversation.
“oh, that’s so cool...” you say not wanting anything more to do with this girl.
“do you wanna know who it was?”
“no that’s okay, you probably shouldn’t tell people anywa-”
“they were in nct 127!”
“what” you say a little too loudly.
“you heard me” she smirks definitely liking your shocked reaction.
she disinterestedly plays with a pink charm on her purse. she was going to make you ask to her to tell the rest of the story. you had to know a little bit more because wayv and nct 127 were both sub units.
you hated girls like this.
“nene, can you please tell me a little more? if you can, i understand if you can’t but-”
“okay, it was like 5 months ago and i was at one of the recording studios downtown doing backup vocals for this really cool band called the rain and as i was going to get a snack they literally walked right past me.”
she retells the story so perfectly and without skipping a beat. you figured she was telling the truth.
“and i totally make eye contact with taeyong. like eye contact” she emphasizes making big eyes at you while continuing.
“the recording manager said that they’d be on a break in 20 so i waited outside and when taeyong came out he says hi to me. and we talk for a little bit and he gives me his number! his actual phone number.”
“wow” you say trying to sound enthusiastic. maybe this was just a boring story and you shouldn’t have asked about it.
“so then a week later we set a date at the dorms... and you know” she says smiling cheekily at me.
“he was super sweet too, he told me this funny story of when mark went on a date with a reporter because she kept writing bad articles about them and she totally thinks that he likes her and that they’re like dating or something. anyways, when i got there..”
your jaw dropped. it made sense now. why they were nice to you and became your friend so suddenly.
god you were so dumb,
why didn’t you think that the managers of wayv would also get the rough drafts of your report too. they definitely told the boys about what you had initially said.
it was apparent now that they were just using you so you’d write a positive report based off of friendship not truth.
“hey y/n?” nene says pinching your arm with her pointy nails. “oh...” she says while definitely trying to suppress her smile. “i forgot, aren’t you are reporter too?” she tilts her head looking at you bemusedly to see how you’d react.
“this is my stop” you say while gesturing to the red flashing light announcing the street that the dance studio is at.
“bye y/n!” nene screeches from inside the bus. “you know where to contact me!”
you wave meekly as the doors shut and the bus passes by you.
while walking to the studio your sadness of being deceived turns into anger and embarrassment. you hated celebrities and vocal majors and cold days and bagels.
you walk into the building and find the room number you had written down on a piece of paper. you walk up two flights of stairs and down a large hallway with closed doors.
finally, you bust into their room to see them by the full length mirrors practicing formations.
they saw the pain and anger on your face and were frightened by how different you seemed.
“y/n, are you okay?” kun asks getting up off of the floor visibly concerned.
you knew that you shouldn’t do this here for so many different reasons. but you felt like you had too. wayv meant too much to you for it all to be fake.
“is this real.” you ask, staring at them and their confused expressions.
“y/n what do you mean-” kun starts
“is this real. is our friendship real?”
they look at you quizzically. why were you bringing this up now.
“yes, we’re friends now. remember we got past the whole hating eachother bit and banded together to make music and you were gonna write the article-”
you cut ten off sharply
“are you just being nice to me because of my job. because you want me to write something nice about you guys.”
they stay silent as you feverishly try to push back tears. the buzz of the room is so loud in your ears.
“i know this is dumb because we haven’t known eachother for long. but i thought that we were friends. i thought you guys- you superstars liked me for who i was. i- over this week i was really happy working and talking with you guys. i’m so stupid to think that you would actually like me.”
you started to get really nervous for speaking your thoughts to them in a rom-com fashion. you wanted to crawl into the floors and disappear.
everyone is quiet for a moment. thinking over what you said as you clutch the cold bagel in your purse trying not to cry.
“what about the song? do you think that was fake? or that we do that with every reporter?” lucas asks.
you look up at them.
“do you know what yan yu means?” yangyang asks
“of course” you reply. “ it means to speak”
“that’s going to be the name of our new title track.” he replies
you look at yangyang wanting him to explain.
winwin steps forward slightly looking at the ground.
“we called it yan yu because you allowed us to speak. because of all that you’ve done while you’ve been here. the thing we care about most isn’t the article, it’s having our own voices. we want to tell the world- through our music that we’re ready to be heard because we finally have something we can say that’s ours. this is all because of you, we can speak now because of you.”
you look into his eyes as they soften in the corners. you know that what winwin said is real because he never liked you enough in the first place to make up such a heartfelt lie.
you start to melt a little as you continue to process the words.
“if we wanted you to write a positive article we would’ve just seduced you.” hendery says. “it’s easier and probably has faster results especially if there’s more of us-”
you run and hug hendery before he finishes. you smile in his arms as he hugs you back. you pretend that you’re not crying but his shirt is probably wet now, so they’ll find out very soon.
what they said was so sincere and nice. you were now convinced that what you had with the boys was real to them too.
all of your worries from early dissipate into the stale air above you. you felt someone hug you from behind only to feel lucas’s warm chest against your back. you smiled bigger as you felt the other members join your hug, feeling warmer and warmer each time a member joins.
a moment later when they were all silent you spoke, trying to not let your voice crack from your crying.
“you deserve to be heard. you guys have so many important things to say and a lot of music that needs to be listened to. i’m glad i could help you all become the fantastic artists you’ve always been.”
you feel the hug tighten around you and you swear your heart smiles within your chest.
how were you ever going to phrase this in the report.
“no, xiaojuns arm is too far above lucas’s it looks weird.”
“are you sure that’s not what the video looks like?” ten questions walking over to inspect the boys formation.
“no shes right” he says moments later after glancing at the laptop screen.
he adjusts their arms and they slowly runs through the next steps as you try to compare them to the video they had given you on one of their laptops.
you stop them seconds later, “lucas coming down from the high kick you were behind by a few seconds and henderey you need to extend your leg more.”
they run the moves again as you enjoy your newfound power over the boys. they had been practicing a new intro choreo for their music bank performance for a little over two hours.
you had agreed to help them because you thought it would be good to add how much hard work and dedication it took to just perform a two minute intro for your article.
okay, another part of you also felt bad for barging into the practice room, accusing them of being fake friends and thinking that they were influencing you so you’d use the little power you did have to make them look good. maybe a little more of the second, but they didn’t need to know that.
“wait stop! did you guys change that cross formation there or was it in the second half.”
“um,” ten says while sweating and breathing vigorously from the nonstop motion. “we changed the triangle formation in the second half to the diagonal line. this is the cross formation.”
“okay, i wasn’t sure, i’ll mark it down. also lucas and yangyang you guys need to fix your levels on that cross because it looks unbalanced” you say while scribbling that down on the stage direction sheet.
“jeesh” xiaojun whispers to the boys, “she’s worse than our choreographer and that’s his actual job.”
the boys chuckle while glancing over at you as you wrote the note down.
“well we’ll be out of here faster and the performance will be good.” kun shrugs while trying to hold back how tired he really was.
lucas pokes kun’s shoulder with one of his long fingers and he goes tumbling down to the ground. the boys laugh hysterically.
“you won’t even be able to walk by the time we do have to perform!” lucas yells in his face while laughing at the tiny amount of pressure that had sent him tumbling to the ground.
“okay we’re gonna take it from the top one more time!” kun yells at you while trying to get up off the ground as the boys continue to laugh at him instead of helping him.
you nod and rewind the video. you had a few more notes but wasn’t sure if they could handle it today. kun seemed pretty tired so reluctantly you just pressed play and let the music run.
you watched the boys in such fascination at how fast and expertly their bodies moved. it was insane to you how some of them couldn’t even dance before becoming trainees but now were better than some professional dancers.
the boys were hard at work on this sunday afternoon. practicing the same painstaking motions over and over again until it morphed into art. to this day i will never understand how idols can turn such mundane actions into a performance piece worthy of national acclaim. for now i have only one solution, i believe there is something inside them that is extraordinary.
part 7 will be linked down here:)
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Bet (1/4)
Summary: Through a series of bets made between the two of them, new literature teacher, YN YLN, gets closer to old physics teacher, Bucky Barnes
Words: 2K
Pairings: BuckyYN, Stony, Samtasha
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“Well, It’s likely not an accurate storytelling of Native Canadian culture, is it? I mean, Boyden was a white dude writing about native Canadians and profiting off of them when there are people that the money would actually help and be earned by someone who actually knows how deeply the wendigo legends can affect people.” Michelle said without raising her hand, and YN looked up from her place at the front of the class, a smile spreading over her face in pride.
YN YLN was the newest addition to the staff at MidTown high school, and she was nothing short of a breath of fresh air. The young Literature teacher had only graduated from university a year and a half ago, taking a gap year to see the world before settling down in her home city of Queens, New York. She challenged her student in a way that they hadn’t been challenged by previous teachers— some of the things Michelle and Peter would tell her about previous English teacher, Brock Rumlow was revolting.
Sure, he did only teach Literature on the side of his PE classes, but nevertheless.
“Brilliant, Michelle.” She winked at her smartest student and Michelle couldn’t help but flush with pride, sinking deeper into one of the many couches YN had thrifted to fill her class with.
“Now, before you all start packing up, I want you guys to know that all ten of your journal entries about ‘Brave New World’ are due this Friday. Yes, Eugene, this Friday.” She hummed, catching Flash grumble to his sidekicks. Flash’s head shot up and seeing YN already staring at him, he flushed and shouldered his backpack.
When he bell rung, YN packed her things, waiting for the last student to leave before grabbing her keys and locking the door behind her and heading her way to the staff room. She greeted a few of the ninth graders sitting on the floor outside of her class and stepping over their bags and walking down the way.
“YLN!” She heard a familiar voice call and she turned quickly to see Natasha Romanoff shutting the door to her honours history class and jogging to catch up to her. Natasha had proven to be a huge help in helping the younger teacher settle into the hustle and bustle of the school, and had also come out to be a very possible close friend.
“How was your weekend?” She asked, falling into step with the younger teacher.
“Boring, honestly. I just marked papers and binged ‘The Legend of She-Ra’ again.” She replied, and rolled her eyes playfully at the scoff that came from her friend.
“You’re such a nerd it’s almost painful sometimes. Listen, there’s a barbecue at Sam and I’s place, and we’re inviting the whole staff. Its a beginning of the year tradition— you have to come.” Natasha smiled as she pushed open the staff room door. YN made a noise and walked in ahead of her and turned before she saw who was in the room.
“I don’t know, I have a senior year class that’s giving me their journal entries for the book Rumlow made them read over the summer— which was ridiculous. Literally, how are you okay assigning homework over the holidays? And a book that complicated and expecting decent results? I’ve never met the guy but I’m happy he was fired.” YN ranted, and Natasha looked on fondly.
“Listen, You’re new to the staff and you’ve barely met anyone but me and Sam and Steve. This would be great for you to do.” She begged and YN rolled her neck and turned away from her, eyes landing directly on the group of men crowded around a table and laughing loudly.
Steve Rogers (Humanities), had his arm resting on the back of Tony Starks (Chemistry) chair— according to Natasha, it was pretty common for teachers to start relationships with each other here. Her and Sam Wilson (he also taught history) had been dating around two years, and Steve and Tony, guessing by the rings on their fingers, had been married quite some time. Sam glanced towards the door and upon seeing Natasha, shot up and made his way over to her.
YN would have looked away as he kissed Natasha in greeting if she had been looking in the first place. Next to Steve sat the tall, beefy, brooding James Barnes. His long-sleeved shirt seemed about ready to tear at the strain his arms were having on it. His hair was tied into a bun at the nape of his neck, and a healthy amount of scruff seemed to have grown over the weekend. He was bantering back and forth with the other Physics teacher, Bruce Banner on an article that had come out on Sunday and while he seemed to be relaxed, he also seemed to be deeply amused by the way Bruce was getting so fired up over the subject.
“Hey, Earth to rookie.” Sam’s voice broke her gaze away from Barnes, and without giving herself time to blush, she smiled up at Sam who seemed to be glaring at her already.
“What did I do?” She asked immediately, and Sam only rose an eyebrow.
“Someone tells me you’re thinking about bailing on this weekend feast? Did she forget to tell you this was an un-skippable event?” He explained and YN rolled her eyes, walking over to the coffee machine and filling her mug again— only adding two sweetener before taking a sip.
“Someone must have forgotten that I have 300 journal entries to grade over the weekend.” She replied, cocking her head and looking at Natasha who only looked pleasantly annoyed.
“So, let me get this straight. You’re going to stay home this weekend and skip a traditional barbecue to grade some homework that the teacher from last year left you?” Sam asked incredulously.
YN pretended to think for a second before nodding and saying “Yep!”
“Dude, just give them all 80% and they’ll be happy.” He groaned, a slight whine entering his tone which happened to amuse YN more than anything else.
“Yeah, and break Michelle Jones’ heart? I don’t think so.” She replied, and YN let her gaze flicker once more to the table in the corner by the window, heat flooding her body pleasantly when she saw James Barnes already looking at her. She watched as he held eye contact before letting his eyes drift over her form and taking in her outfit (flowing skirt and tucked in blouse) and heels before looking at her again and smiling kindly.
“He’s going to be there, too,” Sam said, a smirk on his face that could almost rival Natasha’s. YN fought a sheepish smile and looked up at the couple and back to James, who had already dove deep back into conversation with Bruce.
“I’ll, um— I’ll think about it.”
__________________________
YN was in the middle of shepherding her kids out to the courtyard for a class when she literally ran into James. He was running, already, and YN was amazed by his reflexes as he turned and caught her halfway through her fall. His arms were secure around her waist, and his eyes were wild with excitement— maybe less from their sudden proximity and more due to the fact that there was a group of teenagers behind him holding something that looked vaguely like homemade bottle rockets.
He pulled her to stand, and found himself getting more and more nervous the longer he looked at her this close.
“Im— um, I’m James Barnes.” He said, his voice strong, but nervous. He held out a hand and prayed it wouldn’t be as sweaty as he thought it was as she slipped her own hand into his. He was warm— the sudden heat made her arm hair stand on end, and he fought a shiver as the chill of her own palm rocketed down his spine. “But everyone calls me Bucky.”
“Come on, Bucky, let’s go!” A dark-skinned girl just behind him smirked and he whipped around in surprise before seeing who it was and pointing a finger down at her.
“Watch it, America. I’m not afraid of taking that rocket away from you.” He said sternly, and she held her bottle protectively to her chest, sticking out her tongue playfully before retreating back to her friend group (who was laughing hysterically) consisting of Kate Bishop, Teddy Altman and Cassandra Lang (Scott Lang’s, (Biology) daughter). Eli Bradley and Rayshaun Lucas, who was in her class but also part of that friend group were giggling to each other.
“I’m YN YLN.” She smiled, taking her hand away and shoving it in her skirt pocket to hide the way it shook nervously. In her other hand was ‘Three Day Road’ and on her shoulder was the ratty satchel that looked like it had seen better days.
An expression of Overdramatic recognition flooded his face and he started walking towards the back entrance of the school beside her, their kids trailing behind them like lost ducklings.
“The same YN YLN that would rather skip out on the barbecue and grade than have fun with her peers?” He teased and she laughed, throwing her head back. He ignored the way she went off balance and stepped closer to him. He definitely ignored the way their arms brushed for the fraction of a second.
“You heard about that, huh?” She joked, pushing the doors open and taking a breath of fresh air. They walked across the schools back entrance road and made their way to the expanse of yard beside the track ring where the new gym instructor, Thor, was running laps alongside his students and helping their form and encouraging them with the largest smile.
“I did, and I think you should come. It’s going to be fun, I swear on my life. You’ll be able to meet a few of the kids and everyone is bringing their dogs, so it should be great.” He stopped and told his class to walk a little further to the opening— somewhere safe they would be able to shoot off their rockets.
YN turned to her class and told them to get comfortable as she dropped her bag at the place at the base of the tree they had stopped by.
“The dogs make it even more convincing.” She quipped, now holding her book with both hands and looking up at Bucky. The students on the grass around them were watching them with rapt attention, soaking up this new interaction and getting ready to spread the gossip around the halls during lunch.
“You’ll be able to meet Charlie,” He smiled, bouncing on his toes like an excited child. YN rolled her eyes and decided it would be in their best interest if she played along.
“Who would that be?”
“My mastiff. He’s the biggest cuddle bug.” He smiled, and YN repressed a smile that mirrored his own.
“I don’t know, Mr. Barnes—“ YN said uncertainly and he looked back to his class (not to hide the fact that he was blushing) who were waiting for him fifty feet away. He jumped with an idea ad ran to them, grabbing one purple hole hoop and jogging back, placing the hoop in the middle of her class and smiling at her.
“I’ll make a bet. If I get a bottle in this hoop, you have to come this weekend. If I don’t, you can stay at home and grade.” He smiled and YN just smiled and shook her head, sitting down against the base of the tree and squinting up at him.
“Fine. Now, go do your job, Barnes. You’re being inappropriate.” She chided half-heartedly and he shoved his hands in his pockets and strut away. She looked back at her class who were already watching her with the most amused expressions.
“What?”
“I don’t know if this reminds anyone else of Mr. Wilson in sophomore year trying to get with Miss. Romanoff?” Eli piped up and the rest of the class seemed to remember the story fondly, murmuring to each other and glancing back to Mr. Barnes who was setting his rocket station up. He looked focussed and determined, and YN felt her heart flutter with hope.
“Turn to page 108, please everyone.” She said, cutting off the chatter and waiting for everyone to do so. She nodded to Michelle in front of her and asked her to begin reading. Just as Michelle opened her mouth to begin, a plastic soda bottle landed dead centre in the middle of the class. There was a crowd of ‘whoop!’s’ and YN spun her head to look over at Bucky Barnes, who had two fists raised in the air and the brightest smile on his face.
“See you at Wilsons, YLN!”
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PART TWO
#bucky barnes x reader#plus size!reader x bucky barnes#Bucky Barnes#Bucky Barnes imagine#Bucky Barnes au#Bucky Barnes series#bucky barnes fluff#Bucky Barnes fic#bucky barnes x ofc#bucky barnes x you#teacher!bucky#teacher!au#teacher!YN#professor!bucky
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Find the closest Wells Fargo in New Berlin
Find The nearest Wells Fargo and even ATM Locations in New Berlin, WI. Get Wells Fargo Bank locations and hours, solutions and driving directions.
Wells Fargo Bank in New Berlin, WI
Wells Fargo Bank, 16001 W Cleveland Ave
New Berlin, WI 53151
Reviews
I use this branch to create one or two deposit per month, and I are actually doing this regarding the last several several weeks. Most everyone is extremely nice, although I actually went in today, and We was not too happy with the experience. I was initially on my telephone while I came into the bank, and even My spouse and i was met with by the rep. Typically I have a deposit slip completely ready, consider there was NO other clients in the lender, I travelled right to the teller window. Remember I actually was no longer about my phone call. The teller, though warm and friendly, found this need to let everyone know that "their" customers fill out put in slipping, and that clients according get frustrated when folks like me come into the bank unprepared. Reason us?! As I mentioned prior to, there was no a person in line. We furthermore have been doing this kind of for quite some time, and I experience like she would notice that I normally have anything prepared. As I was leaving, I got inquired if I wanted to analysis my accounts for the free ice cubes scraper. I explained that will We reviewed my company accounts within typically the last couple a few months, plus I made the necessary changes. I furthermore described i used to work at WF, and currently work in the industry, so I do not have much need for a review. No matter, she asked us from least two different occasions. Very annoying! I actually comprehend it is her task to produce everyone these gives, yet there is some sort of fine lie involving getting helpful and staying tricky. One girl guiding the teller line pointed out that will they have made some sort of few becomes the balances just lately, that has been helpful, nevertheless at this point My partner and i had enough. I would provide my phone variety as a result of move on together with my working day, but My partner and i don't think I am stopping in for a good evaluation or the ice scraper. I have recently been looking with regard to a reason to advance my personal accounts from WF, and even this just might possibly be the purpose I needed. If it was not necessarily for the free popcorn, I actually guess this experience may possibly have already been given a 1-star.
Wells Fargo 53214
Wells Fargo Bank, 6130 W National Ave
West Allis, WI 53214
Reviews
Low-budget location with low spending budget help. Inadequate service, very long wait moments. Riffraff consumers as well. Apologies of which I am a purchaser in this article
Wells Fargo Bank Wauwatosa
Wells Fargo Bank, 2675 N Mayfair Rd
Wauwatosa, WI 53226
Reviews
My partner and i found this bank inside search of a Medallion Trademark Guarantee stamp. This is a special trademark promise for the transfer of investments. It's some sort of step further than some sort of notary public, and definitely not just about every financial institution sometimes offers it. Required typically the stamp for some residence paperwork. I used the particular handy dandy Internet to help find who knows where that delivers this service, in addition to I actually found Wells Fargo. I actually called the branch best to me to make sure they do, indeed, have the stamp. I was initially told that just the Mayfair location in addition to the Mequon position offer you the stamp. So off I go, to often the Mayfair location.
I got within and was quickly welcomed by Rashad, a person of the particular brokers. I told Rashad I actually needed a Medallion Personal Guarantee stamp. They informed me he's the consumer the fact that does it, but they need a few specific papers to carry out it. That indicates I have to run back home, grab often the reports I need and even come back. Since undesirable as it is, I need the stamp, therefore I go home together with come back with this proper paperwork. When We returned, Rashad sitting us in his business whilst he grabbed the brand, imprint from the vault. They requested my ID in addition to started out entering some information in to his computer. In this case we struck a snafu. Rashad states I'm certainly not in the personal computer. "Do you have an consideration with us? " Well, virtually no, We don't. That's whenever My spouse and i first learn that will, so that you can issue a new Medallion Unique Guarantee stamp, anyone have to have a free account with Wells Fargo no less than 60 days.
Why did not they will tell me this kind of on the phone, when I called? Rashad felt terrible. I've already made only two trips here, and they can not even help everyone. So Rashad actually dived online and started off phoning around. Finally, the next standard bank he named stated that they would be able to help us. While My spouse and i don't bank on Bore holes Fargo, the customer services I received was first-rate! Rashad went above together with past by calling different banks for me.
Reviews
One WF business is much like the other, in terminology of services. However, My partner and i do have a pair of gripes about this location. One particular, the idea is sometimes hard to get around; when you are coming up northbound on the subject of Mayfair Road, an individual have to make the left turn at Heart Street and then help to make another remaining turn into the lot. Is actually, throughout drive times, it has the hard to make that still left turn into the lot, due to inconsiderate folks at the rear of the wheel, browsing brand eastbound on Center road to get through typically the intersection on Mayfair Route; otherwise, I guess you can take the opportunity and even make a U-turn after which enter from Mayfair Highway.
Another gripe I have around this location is that there is just one single TELLER MACHINES and it can be a driveup office, outside. It really is not under an hang over or perhaps canopy, so you experience the weather. Nope, generally there is certainly not one TELLER MACHINES inside this kind of bank.
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This is definitely a large lobby model bank with comfy seat in the center. Tuesdays visit there was zero line on lunch moment. 2 tellers taking care of push through and table. workers was pleasant plus was able to help me check balance from my personal previous bank Wachovia. Since Water wells Fargo acquired Wachovia after the government-forced selling to be able to avoid a failure connected with Wachovia. The accounts had been merged just last thirty day period. so I have an abundance of new places to find assistance from the banks. I'm getting used to altering since Financial institution Florida seemed to be sold to Initial partnership and first unification had been sold to Wachovia. We still need to get back and find out what just about all the new services not to mention fees will be. I actually hope this is a change to get the better.
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I know regarding finance institutions and everything. Nevertheless the individuals that work with regard to them are just the rest of us trying to earn a living like everybody else. Thus with that being explained the tellers are very curteous and pleasant, likewise very efficient into their jobs.
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That is super annoying to help always have to withstand some sort of sales pitch regarding some product once We need to go for you to the teller to help deposit a check or receive some other service. I actually prefer to do business with a good small local traditional bank or perhaps credit union that will bring their money in the community. The consolidation of typically the banking industry is terrible news for America.
Wells Fargo Bank in 53233
Wells Fargo Bank, 735 W Wisconsin Ave
Milwaukee 53233
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Staff members seemed genuinely happy, hola from anyone. I arrived to pay in since the portable software package limits deposits. Often the extended line of 6 changed fast all brokers ended up moving customers very instantly in fact happy from the particular end of the day. 4: thirty. They opened later with Fri 5: thirty?
The particular complexes lobby is definitely roomy although I don't get precisely why the ceiling fans had been so dirty and consequently high it makes not any efficiency in which level. They should have drop down water lines if they want the fans to be useful.
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Always be advised, Water wells Fargo's credit card client assistance is definitely shipped to Philippines.. would seem unsafe to be writing this sort of secure information offshore...
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Brief service they had loads of clerks operating when I was inline was not in there for whole lot more then a couple of minutes on Feb 5th. All even though they possessed some sort of line.
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I'm unclear precisely why no one likes this Wells Fargo. I popped my checking and financial savings accounts here, and often the period of time that took in order to decide which types ended up right for me, then to open them, was best suited.
I go there just about every various other week to be able to get rolls connected with quarters for laundry, simply no difficulties. Rarely ever wait, but I do as well head out right away in the particular AM.
My partner and i go for you to this location due to the fact really the closest one to help me personally. The rest regarding my communication along with WF is via cell phone. They may 5 stars for me personally because they given excellent customer care, and I love that My partner and i can do everything via his or her app.
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Fast service they had an abundance of sales person working when I had been inline wasn't in right now there for more then 10 a few minutes on Friday. All even though they had a new range.
Wells Fargo Bank Milwaukee 53202
Wells Fargo Bank, 100 E Wisconsin Ave
Milwaukee, WI 53202
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Might be really not the best to compare, although We feel becoming far more a enthusiast of this location as opposed to one down the road; generally mainly because I've gone to the other the small number of times intended for quarters and it's noonday noontide, meridian and they don't have any.: hcg diet plan This location is clean, this attendants are helpful plus efficient, and it's in the great accessible area.
We have constantly been a enormous fan of Wells Fargo, and this also location is just what I'd anticipate a WF Bank to get.
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Really like WF! Why? Well, I actually started off having Norwest following My spouse and i got out of the Dark blue in 97, they possessed totally free checking and many people were offering free pink plastic piggy banks! After that I functioned from Beta Systems ended up all of us produced real-time information so that will later become on the web banking for many clients, certainly one of which was... WF. My partner and i standard bank online all often the time and such as particular attention I comes from becoming a long time consumer. My spouse and i even have the business trading accounts with them all.
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My partner and i had an issue that left me high and dry immediately after talking to buyer service (among various other departments) on the phone. While a previous ditch I went to that department and they not only straightened everything out, these people actually identified the concern. The Branch Director, Lead Teller and Personal Banker We dealt with were being every a pleasure to help deal with. These were all of extraordinarily helpful in addition to I couldn't ask for a lot more. They went way earlier mentioned and way beyond.
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Oh man, I don't even know if you're still taking prompts for the challenge, but here goes my contribution: "You have one hour. Go."
I used the sentence at the end though, I hope it’s alright ^^
Ao3 version.
“Thomas, this is Newton.”
Newt sort of expected this type, tobe completely honest. Maybe a little more buffed, or with slightly differenthairstyle you had seen on about every other jock boy at school that remindedyou of a parrot, but the result was more or less the same – a boy about thesame height as Newt, but wider in shoulders and build, with big, brown eyes andmessy brown hair, and with an annoyed look in his face that was completelyexpected and basically identical to any other slacker Newt had to tutor.
They were all the same, when Newtthought about it. Either living a partying life where staying at home equalleda sin for them and not able to keep it social a torture, or jock types thatjust had to do their daily dose oftestosterone sports to feel manly enough, drank protein shakes and loved technomusic, therefore not having enough time for studying – or brain capacity onthat matter (Newt blamed the techno music – loud enough it definitely had tokill some braincells).
“Um,” the boy let out and criticallylooked Newt over, like he was analysing him. Newt didn’t need to guess what hewas thinking right now, it perfectly showed on his unhappy face. “Hey. Iguess.”
“I had about three days in a week inmind, minus the weekends, one to three hours per day,” the boy’s mother said andNewt was kind of glad she gave him a reason why to stop watching this guy’s distastefor a moment. His mother seemed like a strict type, but she probably shouldhave whipped him to obedience a little sooner than when it was practically toolate with all the failed subjects. “It depends on your schedule, mostly. And Iguess on Thomas’ progress as well.”
“It’s fine by me,” Newt shrugged. Itwas about the same as everybody. “I may have a little irregular hours schedulethough, if it’s not a problem.”
“Not at all,” Thomas’ mother assuredhim and glanced at her son like an executioner. It was roughly translated to you fuck this up and you’re dead and Newtkind of found this equally hilarious and sad – if she needed to look at himthat way, then it meant Newt was going to have a hard time with him. “He’sgrounded anyway, so he has all afternoons free.”
Thomas rolled his eyes, butthankfully didn’t say anything else and Newt was grateful.
***
Thomas wasn’t a jock, and probablynot exactly a partying type either. He did go out a lot though and apparentlyfound school too boring to bother doing anything else than sit there and yawn. Hewas one year older than Newt and it probably made him pissier that he was goingto be tutored by a 17years old who knew more than him. Maybe that was also whywhen Newt asked him about the subjects he was failing the most, he dumped thewhole content on his bag on the table, probably in revenge.
“Aren’t you a little too young fortutoring?” Thomas uttered when Newt ordered him to sit at his desk, not reallyknowing where to start. He was a damn case of a lost soul and Newt had afeeling he was going to spend a bit too long here for his comfort. His tutoringusually consisted of few months before big exams, but with Thomas it didn’tlook very black and white, more like with too much grey in between.
“Aren’t you a little old for not understandingwhat equals one and one?” he shot back and when Thomas opened his mouth tocounter with something, New crossed his arms on his chest. “If you play ittough and refuse to learn anything, you’ll never get out of here, because yourparents won’t let ya. So either cooperate or say bye bye to freedom.”
Thomas visibly deflated like aballoon and Newt counted it as a win.
***
“Does anybody call you Newt?”
Newt raised an eyebrow and glancedup from homework he had to do while he bestowed a history article on Thomas toread so he could give him a test later. It had been reasonably peaceful untilnow (for about fifteen minutes, which was a success, Thomas usually started tobe restless after five minutes of silence), but it apparently bored Thomas outof his mind already. Newt didn’t have too high hopes for the boy to rememberanything too clearly, since he usually just blurted something out that wasn’teven related to what Newton asked, probably out of spite.
“You’re supposed to read thearticle,” he uttered icily. He had homework due tomorrow and with today’sschedule he simply didn’t have when todo finish it, so he hadto sacrifice at least half an hour of tutoring time to get Thomas bend toself-studying.
“I’m reading. It’s a special case ofboring,” Thomas drawled. “So, doesanybody call you Newt?”
“You’re allowed to ask questionsabout the article only,” the blondshot back. “Any other questions are bothering me.”
“Pretty sure there is somebodycalling you Newt,” Thomas didn’t let himself to be bothered by Newt’s attitude,as always, and pushed the book away while staring at him like he wanted tosolve him somehow.
“Read.”
“After you answer my question,”Thomas opposed.
“You didn’t do anything for thewhole day and you want a reward? That’s not how it works,” the blond glanced upat him from under his fringe and his eyes were piercing. He just needed alittle more time, for fuck’s sake. This guy was a torture.
“I only asked about your name,”Thomas shrugged. “How’s that a reward?”
“Something you want is considered a reward,” Newt stated simply and scribbled aresult of one of the exercises. With the amount of disturbances today he wasn’tentirely sure it was right, but at least there was something and he tried. “Therefore for a reward there has to be aquest done.”
“God, you talk like Gandalf,” Thomasgave up and pulled the book back with a heavy sigh.
“Well, at least you read something,”Newt commented with a snort and Thomas only rolled his eyes and looked like hewas willing to stay quiet for a bit longer.
It took another twenty minutes untilNewt was actually done with his own homework and put it away while lookingexpectantly at Thomas’ book. It was a fairly long article, he had to admit, butprobably not as long as the time hegave Thomas to read it. He must have gone through it several times in that case– or maybe he simply ignored it until Newt was done.
“So during which years the civil warlasted?” he asked while fishing his bag for the test he managed to get made andprint it at school. Giving it Thomas with his own handwriting wouldn’t reallyprove helpful, since rarely anybody could read it after him.
“I dunno, from what century areyou?” Thomas shrugged and Newt rolled his eyes. “Gee, like 1861 to 1865 orsomethin’?”
“You’re going to be a hard work,”Newt mumbled more to himself than to Thomas, but nodded anyway. “What about thepresidential election? Who led the Republicans and when?”
“Lincoln,” Thomas answered with asigh. “1860.”
Newt nodded again and handed him thetest. It proved better for Thomas to answer right than when he asked verbally,because at that point Thomas simply made something up to vex him.
“My friends call me Newt,” he saidsimply. After all he earned the answer. “My family sticks to Newton.”
“Oh,” Thomas blinked in an evidentsurprise. “’kay.”
Newt didn’t really say anything elseuntil Thomas was done with the test.
He got an A.
***
“Are you always creeping in therooms of people you’re tutoring like that?”
It was Friday and Newt was tired. Heskipped the last lesson at school because he had too much to do and too littletime with today’s tutoring day as well. He managed to arrive sooner than Thomasthough and his mother let him in to wait in Thomas’ room in meantime, which inretrospect probably seemed a little weird.
“I usually wait for them to inviteme, but you’re a special case, so I skipped the pleasantries,” Newt offeredwithout hesitation and glanced at his watch. “Not to mention you’re lateanyway. I was here on time.”
Thomas shrugged and threw his bag tothe corner as he did every day and Newt was starting to get used to it. Thewall already looked like it lived through it for some years anyway, so itapparently wasn’t a fleeting occurrence or an anger part on Thomas’ side forthe tutoring punishment.
“How did the test go?” he tilted his head tothe side and Thomas stopped mid-move like it just occurred to him. He turnedaround and walked back to the bag and took out the paper with a nice, red A onit. He only made the paper a little more presentable from the state it was inand handed it to his tutor without a word.
“Not bad,” Newt spoke up afterseveral seconds of reading and his lips curled up in a smile. There werequestions Newt didn’t even go through with him and yet he got them rightwithout a problem, which proved he wasn’t stupid at all. “You’re actuallypretty smart, aren’t you? Why the bad grades when you know what’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Thomas mumbled andtossed his bag back to the corner. “I don’t like studying.”
He circled the table and crashed onhis bed and it looked like he was in a pretty bad mood.
“You study nicely,” Newt opposed,glancing at him from the paper. “An hour on Wednesday and you got the test onA, so what’s the problem? Lazy?”
“I guess,” Thomas shrugged.
“Maybe motivation would be inorder,” the blond offered, putting the test on the desk. He usually did thatwith students that were really trying hard to get better, because motivationwas always the best thing to reach the right result, and even though Thomasusually seemed like studying physically pained him, he did get an A on the test today.
“Maybe,” Thomas said shortly, watchingNewt intently. There was something calculating in his stare and before Newtcould come up with the right offer that could actually interest a guy likeThomas, the brunet leaned back in his bed and smirked. “How about a kiss?”
“I’m sorry?” Newt blinked. Surely heheard wrong?
“A kiss,” Thomas repeated calmly.“So I have something to look forward to after a day of school and another dose of boring here that,quite frankly, is slowly killing me.”
“That’syour motivation?” Newt pinched the bridge of his nose. Why did he offer it inthe first place? He should have known Thomas would try to make fun of himsomehow.
“Yep,” the brunet didn’t lookapologetic at all and Newt still waited for him to start laughing and maybe pullout a camera to snap a photo of his shocked face, but he just sat there andsmiled like he swallowed a canary. “You said it’s in order, so I’m telling youwhat I want in exchange.”
He didn’t look like the type, Newtmused. Why the hell would he even askabout something like that?
“Do I look like a kissing booth toyou?” he sighed in defeat, because sometimes it was really difficult to winagainst guys like Thomas. He could always tell his mother, of course, but thatwas low even for him.
“No, the price tag is missing,”Thomas opposed simply. “But you do look kinda kissable, just sayin’.”
“I can’t believe you even have theaudacity to ask about such stupid thing,” Newt shook his head. “Think again.”
“You’re no fun,” Thomas faked adramatic sigh and plopped back on the bed.
Newt was really, really having a badday.
***
“Do you even like kissing?”
Newt actually stopped writing andlooked at Thomas as if he grew another head. It was Monday and Newt all butforgot about Thomas’ weird-ass proposition from Friday over the weekend, justso it could bite him in the ass today.
“Why do you ask?” Newt inquiredrather unhappily, even though he knew he was not going to like the answer.
“I wanna know more about you,”Thomas shrugged like it was no big deal and Newt wanted to hit him withsomething heavy over the head. Maybe it would light up some synapses, finally.
“Cuz my opinion on kissing is vitalinformation,” Newt frowned and Thomas had the nerve to nod in agreement.
“Well, I wanna know.”
“I don’t mind it, I guess,” Newtuttered. It wasn’t like he had a huge experience in that field – he kissed fewpeople, yes, but it wasn’t anything special. He didn’t dislike it but he alsowasn’t a fanboy of it either. It was kind of… meh.
“With or without tongue?” anotherquestion and Newt banged his head against the table in frustration. Whobestowed him with such aggravating pupil? Was it a punishment from above?
“Seriously, why are you asking such stupid questions?”
“To stay motivated,” Thomas pointedat the test Newt had been correcting. “I’ll need the knowledge soon.”
“Wha-,”
“Would be a faux pas if you actuallyfancied French kissing more than normal one, you see,” Thomas grinned anddidn’t look that surprised when Newtthrew the pen at him. Too bad it didn’t leave permanent consequences.
***
“Are you a virgin?”
“An Aries,” Newt countered withoutmissing a beat and Thomas snorted.
Not again.
“Single?” he didn’t give up thoughand Newt gripped the pen he was correcting the test with tighter.
“Yes,” he bit out. This guy kept itup for a week already, and eachquestion was more embarrassing than the previous one.
“How so? No girl for tutoring whowould catch your eye?” Thomas leaned back in his chair and Newt let out asuffering sigh. “Or a boy. I don’t judge.”
“Unfortunately I tutor only the dumbones and they don’t exactly hold much of an appeal,” Newt glared at him withfrom his spot. “Like you, for example.”
“Ouch.”
“Your score is 40 %,” Newt scribbledthe mark on the paper and pushed it back towards Thomas. “Care to explain?”
“I’m not motivated,” Thomas shruggedwithout even looking at the test. Newt was pretty sure he got it wrong onpurpose and it was making his blood boil. He was gathering the tests forThomas’ mother, as a proof of her son’s progress, and as good as the first oneswere, the last ones during this week were getting worse and worse, and for apetty reason on top of that. “It had been a week and I still didn’t get mykiss, what do you expect? I had been working hard without a reward, and I’m fedup already.”
“Bloody hell, Thomas,” Newt groanedand rubbed his eyes. “How long are you going to keep this up? It’s not a game.You’re studying for yourself, not for me.”
“A kiss or we’re done talking,”Thomas replied stubbornly and Newt wanted to strangle him. What the hell washis aim? He seriously waited for Newt to agree so he could make a video aboutit or why the bloody hell would he want that?
“You’re insane.”
“Well, that wasn’t a no,” Thomas commented and stood up, justso he could flop down in front of Newt who was sitting on the floor. “Not goingto bite, I swear.”
Newt could only stare – this guycouldn’t be serious, could he? He definitely meant this as a way of teasing,because otherwise there simply wasn’t even a tiniest sense to it. But whenThomas’ hands fell on Newt’s thighs to pull him closer, the blond realized thiswas not just for a show. He wasreally going to do it.
“I told you I’m not here to do youany pleasantries,” he blurted out when Thomas started to lean in, and at leastit halted the approach a little.
“You’re motivating me,” Thomas opposed with a shrug and grabbed him tighterso he could pull him closer. Newt’s hands immediately flew up towards hischest, pushing against it. “That’s different.”
“Are you out of your mind?!”
“Nah, not yet,” the brunet respondedand one of his hands changed the location, so he could hold back of Newt’shead. His touch was surprisingly gentle and if Newt really wanted, he could getaway easily. “Getting my reward now.”
Newt was probably too stunned toreact properly, and his half-hearted defence was so lame even he had to admitit didn’t look very refusing, so when Thomas actually did press his lipsagainst his, he remained stiffly on the spot.
It wasn’t anything big or mindblowing, really. Maybe more like a peck, soft and not even forceful and beforeNewt could actually analyse the situation, it was already over and Thomas waspulling away with a blank expression, only silently watching the blond fromunder long, black eyelashes (Newt never noticed he actually had really niceeyes, which was obviously not good tothink right bloody now!).
“Oh look,” the brunet said lazily.“You’re still alive.”
Newt stared dumbly without any wordscoming to him, and when Thomas disentangled them and reached for the test hefilled today, he took the liberty and let out the breath he didn’t know he washolding.
Ten minutes of Thomas’ work laterand one more Newt’s correction after the test’s mark changed to B+.
***
“Focus.”
“My head hurts.”
“My condolences, now focus.”
Thomas groaned but actually lookedlike he focused back at the math problem as he should have. He had been terriblyrestless from the first hello today and it slowly flooded Newt’s mind as well.
“Can we leave it for tomorrow?”
“No, you have a test tomorrow,” Newtrefused sternly and Thomas clicked his pen several times with a sufferingexpression.
“I don’t want to do anything,” hemumbled. “I feel like shit and this is not going anywhere.”
“Thomas, please be a good boy andsolve at least this one problem, so I don’t need to worry about you fucking itup tomorrow,” Newt sighed tiredly. He too was not in the mood for math,especially not for equations and all the rubbish around it, but Thomas’ exam wasscheduled for tomorrow and they knew about it since Monday, so no matter howThomas struggled to delay it, Newt was not letting him. Not to mention the motivation system Thomas decided toestablish was officially on, and as much as the first Friday reward wasbasically a peck with nothing to be worried about, the Monday one actually gotlonger and little surer and Newt realized that even though it was stupid andprobably with a really bad intent behind it that was going to bite him in theass in the end, it kept Thomas on the track. Most of the tests Newt gave himafter a lecture were getting good results, and if not, it was in fact becauseThomas didn’t properly understand it. At that point at least Newt found outwhat they needed to focus on without his pupil playing the lazy card.
Thomas made a disagreeing noise, butactually did what he was asked to do and started writing, then crossed it outand started anew.
“Do you need me to explain itagain?” Newt asked while watching him struggling and Thomas shook his head.
“I get it,” he grumbled, visiblyaggravated. “I just can’t concentrate.”
“Take a break then,” Newt took thepen out of his hand and Thomas let out a long sigh. “Maybe go take a pill orsomething, if your head hurts?”
“I’ll sleep it off,” the brunetshrugged and dragged himself up and on the bed. “It had been a long fuckingday, I’m just tired.”
“You’re going to sleep now?” Newt turned to him with wide eyes;because really, he was paid forspending time here and Thomas wanted waste it while taking a nap? If his motherknew she would probably rage like a nine headed dragon.
“A lil nap,” Thomas mumbled whilecurling on the mattress. “Wanna join me?”
“Not at all,” Newt rolled his eyesand pulled his bag closer to him so he could take out his own work. He planneddoing his stuff in the evening, but since the opportunity presented itself, hewasn’t going to waste it. “I have a work to do anyway.”
“Spoilsport,” Thomas chuckledsleepily and before Newt could actually react, he was out cold.
***
It was a gentle tugging on his hairthat brought him back from the focused reading, and for a second he wasn’t surewhat was happening until he realized he had been propped against the side ofthe bed and Thomas just woke up.
“You’ve really nice hair,” thebrunet said while raking his hand through it and Newt let out a small sigh. Heseriously couldn’t read this guy – demanding kisses and petting him like a dog,was there more to it or was he simply so bored he decided to bother the onlyperson he could?
“Thanks, I grew them myself,” heretorted and closed the book he was reading. He heard Thomas laughing, but thetouch didn’t disappear, and quite frankly it didn’t feel bad at all. “Feelingbetter?”
“Mhm,” came a hum. “Sluggish tho.”
“Ready to try to solve the problemagain?” Newt avoided another touch and reached for the paper Thomas had beenworking on before, handing it to him. “At least that one.”
“You’re a slaver,” the brunetgrumbled, but when Newt gave him the pen and the book he could use as a table,he actually started writing.
He was a strange guy, Newt mused.The first impression told him he was going to be problematic, but outside ofhim being a little pushy with rewardshe turned out to be surprisingly docile and obedient, even worked hard. Newtcouldn’t say he disliked him, which usually happened with these types of guys.He actually grew to like him in a sense, his humour and lazy smile.
“Ha!” Thomas’ voice almost made himjump out of his skin, and then there was the paper with the math problem, allsolved, with Thomas grinning victoriously. “Is this the right result?”
Newt quickly went through it andsmiled.
“Yeah, good job,” he praised himproudly. “Guess you’re ready for tomorrow.”
“Ayyy,” Thomas slid down the bed andNewt yelped right the moment he got grabbed under his knees and pulled almoston Thomas’ lap, with his legs resting on Thomas’ thighs. Before he couldprotest against such manhandling, Thomas was already pushing insistently intohis personal space and capturing his mouth in a kiss.
It was different now – they were sodamn close Newt could feel Thomas’heartbeat against his chest, and the hands that usually only rested somewherenow kept on traveling over Newt’s back and sides and hips, like he was mappinghim curiously. This wasn’t only a peck either, Thomas was pushing him more,even sucking on his lower lip occasionally as if he was teasing him, and Newt’sblood was roaring loudly in his ears and his heart rabbited in his chest likecrazy.
Newt distinctly thought he shouldhave been offended somehow – this wasn’t justa kiss anymore, it was like they were making out, and it wasn’t somethingthey agreed on (hell, Newt didn’t even agree to the normal kissing part, Thomasbasically decided it on his own and Newt tolerated it because it improved hispupil’s grades, as lame as it sounded). But he didn’t fight it, he participated and if he wanted to refusethe fact he liked it, he would haveto hit himself for lying.
He just didn’t understand why was this happening.
When Thomas pulled slightly way,Newt realized he was out of air and gulped it down like a drowning man. He felthot, on board of feverish, and the proximity they had seriously didn’t help himto calm down.
“Wha-,”
“I can’t think of any suitableexcuse,” Thomas didn’t let him finish and Newt noticed how his pupils wereblown wide like crazy. He kept on skimming from Newt’s lips to his eyes andback up and Newt felt the hungry gaze somewhere deep inside of his chest, slowlytraveling to his abdomen like butterflies. Thomas was still holding him close,his grip firm like he was afraid Newt would run away, and quite frankly Newtshould have, but somehow couldn’t bring himself to do so.
“Can I get motivated in advance?”the brunet asked breathlessly and Newt’s stomach made a somersault. “Because Ireally, really want to kiss you again.”
No, hethought of saying. No, because it wasa bad thing, Thomas wasn’t the right person, couldn’t be – their worlds weredifferent, their schedules didn’t match up, and once the tutoring was over,what then?
“You have one hour,” he let out. “Go.”
Thomas didn’t wait for anything elsebefore swallowing any possible protest Newt could possibly say later. One hourwas simply not enough.
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Blink and You’ll Miss It - Part 2
Summary: Sanha’s been a curious shit her whole life. Jackson’s always told her she’s going to get herself killed at some point. She thought that was a bunch of bull, but he might’ve actually been right. She might be in way over her head on this one.
Featuring: A bunch of bull, a lot of cursing, merciless butchering of honorifics, and other things. Essentially, it’s a Comedy of Errors: Story Version.
Warnings: Cursing. Lots and lots of it.
First ~~~ Previous ~~~ Next
Masterlist
** So this has been edited, and initially any ‘dorms’ were apartments. I didn’t want to edit it too much because it would majorly mess up the plot beyond repair. Please just assume that this school is rich as hell
“Did you seriously go antiques shopping again?”
“You never know what kids of stuff you’ll find!”
Sanha set her stack of ancient picture frames on the counter, dust billowing into the air. Her roommate waved it away, coughing. Youngjae added a few frames to the stack with his free hand, the other occupied with an old looking lamp (although it ran on electricity, as evidenced by the power cable hanging off his elbow).
“I see you dragged our neighbor into this,” Jackson noted.
Sanha rolled her eyes with a grin. “You hate antiques shopping, I didn’t want to inconvenience you.”
“At least it’s less dangerous than wandering closed off sections of campus.” Jackson lifted a picture frame from the top of the stack. “What’re you going to use these for?”
“What are picture frames for?” she countered, carefully taking the frame out of his hands.
He sighed at her, exaggerating the motion. “You’re a witch, honey. I never know what’s for your spells and what’s for home decor.”
“These’re for spells.” She held up half of the frames, all with cracks in the glass. “The rest are for decor.”
“And the lamp?”
“That’s for me.” Youngjae beamed. “It’s in decent condition.”
“Does it even turn on?”
“Why do you have to be such a buzzkill?” Sanha teased. “Can’t you just let us have our hobbies?”
“At least this one can’t get you killed,” Jackson conceded. Sanha knocked on wood, and he made a face at her before turning to their neighbor. “Thank you for going with her and making sure she doesn’t go anywhere dangerous.”
“You’re welcome, hyung!”
~~~~~~~
Sanha sat on her heels on her bedroom floor, sorting out her new picture frames and wiping them off with a dust cloth. She’d read somewhere that picture frames could act as a viewing portal, especially if the glass was cracked, and was eager to try it out herself. She had a couple pictures from some old haunts that she’d like to look into, literally.
She gently pulled the back out of a frame, swiping it with the dust cloth. To her surprise, a piece of paper pulled free and drifted to the floor. She’d thought the yellowed back was a part of the frame. She picked up the brittle paper with the utmost care, turning it over in her hands to reveal a newspaper clipping on the other side. The Korean seemed like a different way of speaking than she was used to, meaning it was probably a really old article, if the state of the paper wasn’t enough to denote that. It was hard to decipher, what with regular Korean reading still being difficult for her, along with a couple coffee stains littering the text, but she managed to get the general gist of it.
Officials still have not determined a cause for the explosion last Friday night. The school has shut down the unstable section of campus for the discernable future. Five students are still unaccounted for. Information or tips as to their whereabouts can be sent to the police station.
She could see the top half of the characters for someone’s name below that, and a bit of their hair in the accompanying photo, but not enough to guess the name or the person. She didn’t know the exact date of whatever explosion the article detailed, it wasn’t written, and she didn’t know which school. But an explosion on the grounds of a school tickled her curiosity, and that called for an investigation. That meant research, which she’d openly admit was her favorite part. She pulled her computer onto her lap and began.
Obviously, the first thing to do was make sure her search engine was in Korean. That done, she plugged in a couple search keywords. Five students missing. Five students killed. School explosion. Campus shut down. Only the last pulled up anything she wanted, and all it said was that her school had closed off one section of their campus. Boring. She hadn’t needed google to tell her that.
Just as she was about to click off the tab, her eyes skimmed across the date and she halted. The section had closed in the 20th century. The mid 20th century. That meant it’d been closed off for almost fifty years. The paper looked about that old.
Then again she wasn’t exactly an expert on aged paper, but at the moment it was her best and only lead. The digital archives of the paper only held so much, and she knew what that meant.
“Oppa, I’m going on a field trip!”
~~~~~~~
Jackson had almost insisted on coming, until she told him she was going to the library. Then he told her to have fun and not do anything stupid and said he’d be sitting this one out. He suggested she grab Jaebum on her way out, but she was in a bit of a hurry.
Which was how she found herself cross legged on the floor of the library surrounded by piles of old newspapers. The librarian had been a little nervous, but since Sanha was a regular (and a voracious reader) and always treated the books wish respect, she’d been let loose on the newspapers after promising to be careful.
She’d found an article about the school having a big dance in a copy of the school’s old newspaper, dated around the time the online article had said the section was closed off. She wasn’t sure if it mattered, but she made a note of it and moved on, setting it in the pile she’d dubbed ‘could be important but probably is not’. It was the smallest of the piles, next to the empty space where she’d put the important stuff and dwarfed by the pile she’d dubbed ‘definitely not important but also kinda interesting’. Most pages went into that pile.
She had a couple issues of the paper left, before she’d reach the exact day the section closed, meaning she was almost at a dead end. Despite her apprehension at hitting dead air and having to find a new mystery to poke her nose into, she pushed onward, avoiding her instinct to slow down.
In the issue dated three days after the school dance and a day after the school had closed the section, she found the full version of the clipping from the picture frame. The article itself wasn’t interesting, aside from the confirmation that there had been an explosion on her school’s grounds and that some students had gone missing. No, the interesting bit lay in the pictures that accompanied it, and the articles that came in the days preceding it, front page.
Dormitory explodes! the headline read in huge lettering. The pictures accompanying the article were a before and after. The clipping had only shown the after, and as she stared at the before, blind energy and disbelief surged through her. Not only did she recognize the ‘before’ photo of the ruined building, but she’d been there. She’d walked around inside a destroyed building. And yet, the picture showing the aftermath of the explosion displayed a mound of rubble with emergency response teams picking through the debris for survivors.
The article from the next day listed the names and photos of five missing students, four male and one female. A couple of the names sounded foreign (one boy was called ‘Mark’, as American a name as she could imagine), but the one that caught her wasn’t that of a foreigner. It wasn’t even the name at all.
Smiling almost knowingly up at her from the tiny picture box was the boy from the building, the singing guy who’d run towards her.
She had to set the paper down, bending down to rest her elbows on the floor in a way that stretched out her spine, the thoughts in her mind spinning fast enough that she barely even noticed the pain. She and Jackson had wandered around in a building that didn’t exist, and she’d seen a boy who had gone missing fifty years prior. He didn’t look a day older, either, even though he was probably old enough to be her dad. Maybe her grandfather, if her ancestors had kids quick enough. Was it a ghost? Could buildings be ghosts? Did ghosts even exist?
“They rebuilt it.” She voiced her thoughts aloud. “That must be. They rebuilt the dorm building, and we walked around in that.” It had to be what had happened. They’d rebuilt that building and shut it down again due to an outcry from the parents of the community and just left it there.
She had to check. She had to make sure she wasn’t crazy.
Snapping pictures of the articles she’d found, she put all the papers back where she’d found them and hightailed it out the door. She wasn’t sure she’d ever moved that fast in her life. Rain beat onto her forehead, almost causing her to pause in her mission to just stand there and listen to the soothing sound of it hitting the pavement and her head, but she instead shook her head and carried on. Investigations waited for no one.
Jackson would be livid, of course, but he had told her to have fun. And she was definitely having fun. The most fun she’d had in a while.
She didn’t need a map to get to the closed secion, and slipped through the hole in the fence that she and Jackson had gone through the first time, hidden behind the sign whose words had faded away long ago, but probably said ‘stay out’. Slipping on loose stones, barely avoiding spraining an ankle, she made her way back to where they’d seen the building for the first time.
Stepping around a faculty building, she stopped dead in her tracks.
The articles were right. The building was gone.
#got7#got7 au#jackson wang#choi youngjae#im jaebum#got7 jb#mark tuan#park jinyoung#kim yugyeom#bambam#bambam bhuwakul#tags are still so hard i hate it so much#also jinyoung was the one she saw in the building#just in case that wasn't clear
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Protect Your Family's Mental Health During The Coronavirus Isolation
What a crazy time we are living in. I mean who would think this disease would come and sweep our nation, our world by storm. Everything is happening so fast. New developments every day. But one thing remains the same staying in quarantine(isolation) is the best method in the prevention of this fatally ill virus. 'How To Protect Your Family's Mental Health During The Coronavirus Isolation.'
What Is Being In Quarantine?
Quarantine is the act of being in isolation once a person is exposed to a contagious or infectious disease. In simple terms, there is a contagious virus that is rapidly spreading around the world. In order to slow the process of this disease growing, everyone is advised to isolate themselves into their homes.
Related Post: 101 Family Activities For Your Family To Do While In Quarantine Isolation
It is said that the Coronavirus can last for two weeks(14 days) in the body. The President and Government officials are asked that everyone practice social distancing and not going out of their homes unless it is necessary. Social distancing for a prolonged time can cause a strain on our mental health.
Related Post: If you need to leave the house this is what you need to do
How Has The CoronaVirus Affected Your Family Mental Health?
As of now, much of the world is shut down. Schools are closed around the United States due to the Coronavirus outbreak in 2020. Not only schools but most people that work outside of their homes were sent home to work from home.
The mental health of people is very important. I want to make sure that I let you know it's okay that right now it's not okay. We are all in this together. I want to share some mental health tips that I have been using for my own family mental health.
Many workers that are still needed like cashiers and medical staff is still out here dealing with the public because they are truly needed to help us get through this time. And I hope that they are blessed and protected and their families as well.
Related Post: This Can Prevent Your Family From Getting The Coronavirus
But what about those cashiers and medical staff workers that can't work because schools are closed and many daycares are shut down as well. They have no choice but to quit. If this is you, let's get into some resources to help you out during this time.
How To Protect Your Family's Mental Health During The Coronavirus Isolation
You're stuck at home with your kids. They are out of school and don't know actually when they are going back. You are not working and you don't know when your next check will come through to hold you and your family over. Not only that you feel like you just might go crazy.
This is the mental health that you need to protect. For you to be able to handle all the changes that are going on. You need to have your mental health together. Especially, if you are a single mom and doing this all alone.
For many parents, sending your bickering kids off to school is a break-in itself. And for many kids going to school is a break from home life. They get to hang out with their friends and they are equipped with their school routine. That's all on pause now.
I suffer from anxiety as I'm sure a lot of mothers do. I had my mental health in order. But with the sudden drop of school and now I had to fast track to a summer schedule for my kids minus work and camp/daycare.
So before you become too overwhelmed, I have some things for you to do
How Can My Bills Be Taken Care Of Since The Coronavirus Has Us All Out Of Work?
If you have found yourself like millions out of work due to the Coronavirus outbreak, a major question is how am I going to pay my bills.
According to CNN.com:
Student loans- Have been delayed interest-free for two months
Rent/Mortage- Many foreclosures and evictions have been suspended
Utilities- Shutoffs have been put off until further notice
Food/Medical Assistance- Check with your local Department of Social Services and Board of Education.
My kids' school district is giving out food bags Monday through Friday.
The government has been 'toying' with the idea of sending all Americans with a stimulus check. Read more about that today.
How To Keep My Kids Entertained Through The School Break?
It is important to have a balance with this. Kids are thrown out of whack with their normal routine. And some children do not do good with breaking their routine. Let them have a break, let them play games and relax. But in the mornings I would encourage school work/learning.
My kids' teachers have been going beyond their call of duty. They have been checking in with their students and saying how much they miss them and to stay safe. They also have sent optional work to do. This is so important to stick with but little by little.
This morning activity I just did with my kids and they loved it.
Stay tuned to the schedule I have for my own kids since the 2020 school break. I also have a blank template schedule that you can print out and use now for free.
Here is a list of 101 things that you and your family can do to not to end up bored.
How To Protect Your Family's Mental Health During The Coronavirus Isolation
1.Clean-
Not only because extra cleaning is something you should be doing now. This also can help you and your family to feel better and lift your spirits during this hard time. It is easy to slip into a funk when you are just home. You can protect your family's mental health during the coronavirus isolation by simple yet effective things.
A simple task of making up the bed and opening the blinds for sunlight will make your home even happier during this time. This can also be fun for your kids. Teach them new simple morning chores, like making their bed. Make it rewarding by giving them a star on a chart.
You don't have to buy a fancy chart. A time that you would want them to be quiet. Give them a blank piece of paper and let them decorate it. Make sure you leave blank space for the days of the week. They will feel so happy and ready to put their new chore chart to good use. If have some ink in your printer. Here is a free pdf chore chart I made just for the kiddos.You don't have to sign up or anything. This is my gift to you and your family right now. Stay tuned for more.
Download Free Boy Chore Chart
Download Free Girl Chore Chart
2. Self Care-
I'm not saying you have to put on a full face of makeup to just sit in the house. Actually, this is the time to give your face a break. But don't neglect it. Ditch the makeup for a mask and moisturizer.
Still, brush your kid's hair, but there is no need for them to be school perfect when just lounging around the house. But they can feel so refreshed by preparing themselves for the day like they are going to school. Hair and wardrobe.
I'm a fan of making my kids wear as I call it "soft pants" on days home from school. This is because when you are home, sweats are more comfortable.
3. Encourage Naps
I often hear parents say "My child stopped taking naps at like 2." Yes, naturally they may feel they want to skip naps. But for your sanity and them being refreshed naps are encouraged. Going to bed at a decent time is encouraged as well.
How I explain naps to my kids is. "Your body is like a phone. When it's been on all day, the battery gets drained. And then you have to put it on the charger. Naps are our chargers. We have to recharge our bodies and brains so we can function even more."
I do not know what I would get accomplished if my kids did not take naps.
And even if it's not naps, quiet time when they go in their rooms and lay down on their Tablet or watch a relaxing tv cartoon. Like Tom and Jerry or Max and Ruby.
How To Encourage Naps and Bedtime for my Kids?
Dim Lights No soundWhite Noise Sound like a fan or thisLimited Electronics like the phone. I let my kids watch relaxing Youtube channels and I dim the light on the phone for the first 15 mins or so of nap
I hope that everyone is staying safe and you are able to find some sort of light in being at home. It is hard but be sure to keep you and your family's mental health and overall health thriving during this time.
Stay tuned for more ways to keep you and your family on top of this Coronavirus. And how to effectively get through this healthy and happy.
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...too booked to be bothered...
....I might be a little overwhelmed right now...
...with all the work and photos and holidays and shit that’s going on.....
.....but I”ve been holding in so much word vomit, I really need to puke.
so unfortunately due to the fact that facebook is full of people who would judge me and tell me I am wrong and a horrible person and a victim shammer and racist and god knows whatever else after I get these thoughts out....you get them here tumblr! Call me whatever you want.....I couldn’t care less.
tumblr: where I hide nothing and am actually the most real to myself than any other god forsaken social media. I mean how well can you even know someone by their social media though? fucking ridiculous.
So sit down. buckle up. this is going to be an extremely long one, spanning many issues.
First off. I my uncle died on friday. I’ve been silent on the issue. Is it bad I mourn for my mom and his might as well be wife? Not so much him. He spent his life ruining it with drinking and smoking and bad choices that negatively affected those around him. He waited until he couldn’t talk before going to get a fucking TUMOR even assessed by a doctor. and didn’t even sign himself up for medicare until his brother basically did it for him after the “discovery” of the tumor. What do you mean he had throat cancer? I thought 60 years of smoking is good for you?!?!*shock* My heart breaks for my mom and his wife(ish). I am really worried that the wife(ish) is going to be like “well he gave up, so i might as well too”.....like even if it’s not a conscious thought or decision....maybe especially if its not. ya know? the whole situation just sucks.
People are so shitty to each other. So shitty. Like, I’m a not-really-participating-member of the “beauty community” or whatever you want to call it. But I am a fairly large consumer of the beauty world. I have a fucking addiction to makeup. I love it. I want it. I collect it. I spend way too much money on it. I buy it for my friends. I buy it for me. I buy it for my family. And I like to keep up on the front cutting edge of what’s happening and what’s new and what’s available and what is the very best product. I also can’t afford to purchase every high end makeup release, but I do like watching and hearing others opinions about them. It’s just sad to see that the more widely viewed/available/posting reviewers are such shady, backhanded, backstabbing people. And not just that, but fucking FAKE. their videos and such are so positive and good looking, but if you follow them in any other form they show they are such fake ass drama creating bullshit. not to name names, but I literally cannot stand jacylin hill or laura lee or nikki tutorials and thier fucking boring ass makeup and annoying high school personalities....yet they have their own fucking palettes? how are these people the ones that get their fucking name on the make up?? why don’t companies choose people with an ounce of creativity?!??! I’m not saying I love and adore jeffree star....but goddamn he makes cool original and creative products. I also am not a fan of kat von d......but if you make a fucking stunning product...I will buy it. (re: saint/sinner palette.......so far worth every penny....i love it....and really if you do the math you’re paying like $2.60 per shadow in that thing.....totally better than the serpentina palette I talk shit about every chance I get...).....Seeing them as so annoying makes watching their videos close to impossible because you develop such a hatred for them and who they are.
This halloween I had such a hard time stomaching all the bullshit that was being passed around regarding children’s costumes. In my mind I really do think that there is a line...and it’s not THAT gray.....between being disrespectful to a culture (ie “cultural appropriation”) and having an appreciation of a culture. Example: I shared an article about a Chilkat robe that was returned to alaska. I do not believe that having it hung in their house was WRONG. and I feel like I should have clarified this when I shared the article instead of just saying that I appreciated it. What I really appreciated was that an ORIGINAL FUCKING ARTIFACT was returned to its origin to be kept and studied and passed on for the heritage. Hanging native alaskan art I do not believe is wrong. FYI THEY FUCKING SELL IT. YOU CAN PURCHASE IT WHEN YOU GO THERE. THE NATIVE ARTISTS MAKE MONEY THIS WAY. THEY WANT YOU TO BUY IT AND HANG IT ON YOUR FUCKING WALLS. Hanging native american art in your house and admiring it’s beauty IS NOT FUCKING CULTURAL APPROPRIATION. Now what I do believe is not so great would be emphasizing things of a culture that are cliche or negative. Like dressing up as say like a Muslim terrorist for halloween.....That I believe is wrong. Most Muslims are not terrorists........you dressing up as that for halloween is not appreciating their culture...it’s you being part of the problem by promoting the idea that terrorists are Muslim and Muslims are terrorists......but your child wanting to dress up as Mulan or...what was it this year? Moana? right? like there was press about making sure your fucking 6 year old isn’t allowed to dress up as her. I do not think that is not cultural appropriation. The only reason why they would want to dress up like this is because they think this character is the greatest thing ever and want to be them. That is appreciation. And most likely they have zero regard for what color their hero’s skin is. It’s so horrible for a white little girl to want to be Pocahontas or Mulan but how many little not-white little girls wanted to be Ariel or Belle? or Aurora? AND STILL DO TO THIS DAY? no one talks about them? They should not be limited to only wanting to be the princess of their own skin color!! none of the children should. That’s how you fucking START racism is it not?? Jesus christ. I maybe pale as fuck......but just for the record I am a papered and registered native. Like I literally carry a card and have multiple certificates certifying that I am native. Like there is question to even whether or not “eskimo” is a negative slur now apparently. But that’s what my goddamn papers say I am. God I’m just so over all this “cultural appropriation” bullshit we are inundated with every goddamn day. We are all fucking humans. Let us (and children especially) appreciate what we personally like.
Moving on in this word spewing of views that I’m sure some of you don’t agree with.
Fucking sexual assault. Another thing I am so goddamn over right now. Does it need to stop? Fucking yes it does. Some of the things coming out of the woodwork are absolutely appalling. But the problem lies with.....well...THE LIES. Just like a dude is totally capable of sexually assaulting a girl....a girl is totally capable...if not even more capable...of lying about a dude assaulting her. And regarding this within the music scene.....Is there ARE groupies. There are tons and tons of fucking crazy fans out there. I’ve seen them with my own eyes. They’ve left weird comments on my own photos. And that’s partially the problem is that we believe an half crazed girl who says “*insert any talented hack with a bit of fame behind their name here* sexually assaulted me!!!” over any other facts. And if we don’t believe her we are “victim shaming”....Unfortunately, I have seen those that are crazy enough to say something like this to get a bit of fame. I have seen the girl who vaguebooks every goddamn day. I have seen the girl who fucks her way up the social ladder.....it’s only a matter of time before she’ll start claiming “abuse”. Do I think every case is fame fueled, career damaging, revenge for not paying attention to a fan, bat shit crazy bitch claiming sexual assault?....no. not at all. There are fucking disgusting dudes out there making music and have been proven time and time again that they are exactly what they are shown to be: sexual predators. I’m not going to name names.....but I know a couple names that come to the top of my mind. One never had my support......I mean you just can NOT have a target audience with an average age of 12 and have lyrics about “liking it better on the floor” and “make you wanna fuck all night” and “she sucks me till it snows, i’ll fuck her face so hard”.....I”M SORRY. NO. I’m getting pissed off just looking up these fucking horrible lyrics. fucking talentless joke of a human being. I also personally witnessed this person show his full ass to a crowd of fucking 12 year olds. Pretty sure that’s frowned upon and why the spd were out by his bus after the show. Of course....obviously....nothing serious came of it and it was swept under the rug. The other....just makes me sad. His own words were his own conviction. Calling out and berating girls while confessing his less than innocent relations with them in a public form seen by thousands. girl. bye. So it’s totally not that sexual assault doesn’t happen in the music scene.....but I’ve literally seen more fucking batshit crazy bitches than I have seen sexual preditors. I just feel like no one takes an objective view of it??? it’s all “SHE WAS ASSAULTED!!!! HE DESERVES HIS CAREER RUINED AND DEATH!!!”....no one is listening to the accused in these cases. it’s all a fucking head hunt......I’m seriously concerned for the band decapitation. they’ve been stuck out of their home country for months now. their band is ruined. their reputations are ruined. and unless they ACTUALLY fucking gang raped this spokane girl......well...their lives as they know it are over regardless.....if they actually did rape her then their lives are actually over and they get what they deserve.....BUT so much inconsistencies???....and one of the girls was pulled over for dui?....and is it really going to boil down to whether or not the girl gave consent?....I mean who can be the judge of that??? it’s all going to be on her word.....and she has a documented history of providing false information to the police before??.....christ....what a shitshow......so far the only musician that I can 100% back up the ruining of his career and his death is ian watkins from lostprophets. that dude can die and then fucking rot in purgatory....hell is too good for him.
moving on.
My local scene. my peeps. muh regulars. The division amongst them the past few months has been sad to me. The solidarity that we had a year ago is gone for good. I really don’t think it’s ever coming back. it’s like it got divorced. What’s funny is while I am a part of this group.....I am not TRULY a part of it. even though I consider it my own. I actually have very few friendships within this group, sure I’m facebook “friends” with all these people. But I am more a documenter of this subculture. yeah I look and like and dress the part. yeah I’m at most the events. yeah people are beginning to recognize me without me having ever met them. But but my true real connections are very few. Am I sad about this? no. not at all. I am 120% ok with this. By being someone who is basically outside looking in.......I can see things perhaps others don’t see. Some of the most “popular” people in this crowd........they are not the most beautiful people. And this has nothing to do with appearance. We are goth. We are all beautiful on the outside. But that just means I will avoid them. Basically if I avoid you.....that means I see you as a either negative input in my life and I don’t want it or I am unsure of how you feel about me. If I make an effort to spend time with you....that means I see you as a positive energy and I’ll take all I can get. lol. Honestly though. it’s like the cool photographer’s club.....the same people. at the same shows. every time. I don’t need it. I don’t need others approval. I don’t take photos for others. I take photos for me. if others enjoy them. that’s cool. But they’re for me. it’s like my image journal and/or catalogue of all the cool shit i’ve seen in my life. all the songs i’ve heard. My boss was all “I went to a concert once”......I’m like.....I’ve been to four in the past week and I’m drowning in photos. I think it’s bullshit to do free photos for national touring artists then charge the locals to even take photos. that’s being part of the problem. What new good bands are there? Everything happening right now is shit from the mid 2000s if not earlier. in the past like 18 months or so i’ve seen genitorturers, my life with the thrill kill kult, lords of acid, combichrist, christian death, incubus, jimmy eat world, wednesday 13, pig, orgy/julien k, iron maiden, gwar, vertical horizon, everclear, fastball, sabaton, eve 6, vanessa carlton, john 5, dope, lordi, powerman5000, pretty boy floyd, buckcherry, sebastian bach, opeth, faster pussycat, marilyn manson, slipknot, korn, rob zombie, 16 volt, tim skold, filter......HONESTLY the only newcomer with any staying power is fucking GHOST. which is why I’m even on this godforsaken site. Also in this moment might *MIGHT* have staying power....their show is pretty goddamn epic. It’s just not my thing though. I’m not into it. I mean....not gonna lie.....I liked the beautiful tragedy album.....when they played live they had screens with their logo on it and she was in a little yellow sundress and converse sneakers. Let me know if you want to see those photos. lolz. I laugh at those who photo for likes on facebook or instagram. it must be such a sad existence. A cool photog i’ve connected with recently is photoslavery...look her up......we have a lot of the same views on things and it’s refreshing to find another photog doing it for the fucking ART of doing it. also we use a similar arsenal of tricks.....which is funny......cause it’s a pretty unpopular/unknown?(doubtful)/unappreciated set up. But I obviously don’t listen to what’s known and popular. I heard a phrase the other day that just resonated with me....”too booked to be bothered”.....THAT IS ME. lol. I do not have time to be bothered by trivial things from irrelevant sources....
well I’ve been typing for ages. and I feel a bit better after I’ve vomited all this out. it’s been a rough few weeks.
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Are you an unmotivated teen or a parent of an unmotivated teen? Even the most active and successful teen will become unmotivated at one time or another. Due to the many obstacles, responsibilities, decisions, relationship challenges, pressures and the overall impact of the world, it’s not uncommon to find a teen at a point where he/she feels blue, disinterested, disconnected, and unmotivated. Getting and staying motivated today isn’t easy. Here are a few tips that can get and keep you motivated as a teen, and ready to face the world again. 1. Give yourself a check-up from the neck up. What is your current Attitude? Why? The way to push through a period of feeling down or to lift yourself out of a slump is to change and shift your Attitude to a more positive place. Dr. Wayne Dyer said best, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” Make this very moment – the moment – you change the way you’re currently looking at things so you can put both your Attitude (positive thoughts) and you on a healthier path towards higher levels of self-motivation. 2. Use positive self-talk. If you notice yourself feeling down and unmotivated, be aware of how you're talking to yourself. You may be telling yourself negative things. Negative self-talk like, “There is never anything exciting to do,” “School stinks,” or “I don’t have any friends because no one understands me.” Consider whether you would tell a friend in your situation those same things. Talk positively to yourself. Positive self-talk like, “I can get and stay motivated,” “School might be tough at times, still, I’m going to stay committed to getting the best grades possible.” Encourage yourself as you would a good friend or a younger brother or sister. 3. Focus on one goal. Sometimes when you're unmotivated, it's because you've taken on too much and are overwhelmed. Start getting out of your slump by choosing just one small goal to focus on. For instance, suppose your goal is to get a school project done. Instead of committing to getting the project done the evening before it’s due, start out researching and putting the project together a week or two weeks out by working on the project for 10 minutes a day Monday through Friday. This is a goal you can reach. You may be able to do more, but commit to only a bare minimum. Build on small wins with smart and manageable planning, and you’ll find yourself motivated and less overwhelmed. This will also help you to keep negative self-talk at bay. 4. Find a positive – motivated – role model. Often times when a person is unmotivated, he/she may not be satisfied with the images they see or the emotions that they are feeling. If this is your case, find someone who is positive and motivated, and use them to motivate you. This could be a parent, relative, teacher, friend, mentor or coach. 5. Get up, get out, and go do something YOU consider fun. If anyone sits still long enough, life will become uneventful and boring. This is where you contact a family member or friend to ask them to join you in getting up and going out to do something that is safe, positive and fun. Your only special request to your family member or friend is for the fun to be something YOU like do. 6. Watch or read something inspiring. Inspiring movies and books are always a good source for motivation, encouragement and pick-me-ups! Movies like: “Coach Carter”, “Remember the Titans”, “Freedom Writers”, and “Stand and Deliver”. Books like: Chicken Soup for the Soul, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, How to Win Friends & Influence People, Major in Success, and You Were Born to Be G.R.R.R.R.E.A.T.!!!!TM. Choose a movie or book that appeals most to you and use it to motivate you in periods where you’re unmotivated. 7. Write yourself a positive and encouraging letter. Writing yourself a positive and encouraging letter during times where you’re unmotivated can be one of the most liberating things you can do. In down times, it can be tough to speak positive words aloud or even to say encouraging words to yourself in your mind (thoughts). This is where the technique of writing a positive and encouraging letter to you comes into play. Find yourself a pen/sharpened pencil and a single sheet of lined paper. At the top of the paper in the right-hand corner write your name. Up under your name, write today’s day and date, and up under the day and date, write the current time of the day. Skip down the page three more lines and begin your letter Dear (your name), and two lines below this line write yourself a positive and encouraging letter starting with and completing the following statement: “When I Am Motivated & Excited About Life, _________________________.” You’re to write at least 3 to 4 paragraphs in your letter to yourself. 8. Ask for help. Ask for help when you get discouraged. Call a positive and caring family member or friend. Talk to a counselor or a professional therapist. It doesn't matter who you turn to, just reach out to someone positive, caring, and that you know will be supportive. Right now, throughout your whole being, see and feel how truly good life can be. Carry that positive vision with you as you move forward and create a brighter and more upbeat life. You can get and stay motivated! Life is a gift—don’t waste or miss it by staying unmotivated. Live the beauty that is here for you now by continuously applying the above eight tips. About the Author: Ty Howard, President, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of MOTIVATION magazine Ty Howard is an internationally recognized authority on personal, professional, relationship and habits development. He is the creator and lead facilitator of the trademarked Untie the Knots® Process, and the author of the best-selling book Untie the Knots® That Tie Up Your Life: A Practical Guide to Freeing Yourself from Toxic Habits, Choices, People, and Relationships, as well as dozens of published articles on relationships, healthy habits development, empowerment and peak performance worldwide. For information on the author click on the following link: Ty Howard.
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What’s Love Got to Do With It?
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Alice Driver | Longreads | August 2020 | 9 minutes (2,482 words)
“We need to see the name of the person. We need to know who you want to attract,” the vendor told me as he held up a handful of dried hummingbirds, their four bodies dangling from his fingertips by red pieces of string, feathers worn but shimmering emerald in patches as if clinging to life via sheer radiance. He wanted to know the name of a man, but I was thinking of a painting.
Frida Kahlo wears a dead hummingbird around her neck. She painted Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird in 1940 just after she divorced Diego Rivera and ended an affair with photographer Nickolas Muray. The dead hummingbird is considered a love charm in Mexico, and it is one that would endure and eventually be exported to other countries.
“There is such a lack of love that everyone wants them, young and old,” the vendor told me, agreeing to let me record his answers only if I didn’t share his name, before recounting the steps I needed to take for the hummingbird charm to work:
Write the name of the person you want to love you on a piece of paper.
Put it in a red cloth bag with the hummingbird.
Bathe the hummingbird in the perfume or scent of the person you want to love you on the first day of each month.
Repeat with a new hummingbird for each person you want to fall in love with you.
It had not crossed my mind that anyone would buy more than one hummingbird. But, as a vendor named Sansón explained, “Men want many lovers.” Both Diego and Frida had many lovers, I thought.
The vendors, excited by my line of questioning, seem to think I will be interested in the idea of trapping many lovers with many hummingbirds. That, in fact, is my idea of hell. It reminds me of past boyfriends, who, upon realizing the scope and frequency of my work travel, voiced fears that I had a boyfriend in every city I worked in. It is all I can do to make one person happy and understand them down to the story of every scar. Even then, it will never be the focus of all my energy.
As the vendor told me this, I was standing in a narrow passageway in the Mercado Sonoroa in Mexico City. There, you can acquire all kinds of animals — legal (cages full of chicks dyed pink, purple, yellow, and green) and illegal (puma cubs). It is one of the more dangerous places I’ve worked as a reporter, because in the areas where black market animals are being bought and sold, taking out a camera or a recorder is going to attract unwanted attention. The last time I worked on a project around the market, I was told that a photographer wandering around without permission got beat up.
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Anyone working in Mexico knows that permission comes in many forms, from the jefe of the plaza or the market or the street corner, usually a man who is hard to find, one who has many helpers lounging around and saying things like, “The jefe doesn’t have a schedule, but I’ll tell him you stopped by.” The only way to really get in and do interviews is to go with someone local, so I contacted my friend Luisa who lives in the La Merced neighborhood near the market, and she contacted a vendor at the market who would accompany us and who knew one of the hummingbird sellers and got permission for us to interview him. I went to the market to do interviews for CBC, Canada’s national public radio station, for a piece they were producing about a National Geographic article on the illegal hummingbird charm trade.
To get to the black market hummingbird charms, I passed through the section of the market dedicated to Our Lady of Holy Death, a skeletal saint fondly known as “the skinny one” (“La Flaquita”). The hummingbird charm vendors were lined up together in tiny stalls so stuffed with items that they hardly had space to move, each with different offerings: hummingbirds on a string for 40 pesos ($2), hummingbirds on a stick for 80 pesos ($4), hummingbirds bathed in honey and perfume for 290 pesos ($14), and mounted and pristinely preserved hummingbirds for 600 pesos ($30). All the vendors were men. Some refused to speak to me or let me take photos, aware of the risk that we both ran in documenting the hummingbird charm trade given that some of the hummingbirds were at risk of extinction. It was hard for me to accept that whether some species of hummingbird would live or die out was dependent on the need for love and the belief that it could be charmed.
As I stuck my head into the first vendor’s stall, I was confronted with a glass jar full of hummingbirds mounted on wire sticks, their wings frozen as if they were flying. Their feathers were the color of ash and only tinged green near where the heart used to beat 1,260 times per minute. Many were missing their needle-like beaks, which fall off when the hummingbirds dry out.
Their feathers were the color of ash and only tinged green near where the heart used to beat 1,260 times per minute.
The vendor, perhaps sensing that I would not tell him the name of someone who I wanted to love me, explained that a hummingbird can also bring peace to a family. I understand that he believed that I, a woman, surely had a family. He explained that if, for example, a mother wanted her family to get along, she could buy a hummingbird and take the following steps:
Sit the hummingbird on top of a red apple.
Place the apple on a plate with honey on a table when all the family is present.
The mother must rub the hummingbird in the scent of each member of the family before placing it back on the apple.
In this manner, he told me, a family could achieve peace. I didn’t tell him that I lacked a family, that at 38 — an age that everyone told me was already almost too late — I didn’t even know if I wanted one.
Women can want children — that is an acceptable ambition. But female ambition has certain parameters, and ambition that doesn’t include or prioritize ideas of taking care of others and mothering leaves us vulnerable to attack, to an evaluation of our selfishness.
“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best,” Kahlo once said of her body of work, which includes 80 self-portraits out of 153 paintings. In my three years living in an apartment a few blocks from Frida Kahlo’s Blue House in Mexico City, I can’t tell you how many people have told me they are uninterested in Kahlo’s art because they find her self-portraits to be selfish, boring. A woman who is interested in herself, in her interior life, is still dangerous, a threat to our ideas about who and what is valuable and why. Kahlo may be popular, but people like to make the point that she is not liked, not truly respected. When Guy Trebay wrote about Kahlo’s work for the New York Times in 2015 in an article titled “Frida Kahlo Is Having a Moment,” he opened with this line: “She was a genius before she was a refrigerator magnet, an ace manipulator of society and media nearly a century before social media came into existence.” He admits her genius but immediately ties it to manipulation. Would a male artist ever be described in the same terms? I think we can all agree that Kahlo is having more than a moment.
Looking at handfuls of dried hummingbird charms — some of them species facing extinction — and hearing the men make their sales pitches to me, I thought of something my friend Susanna in Mexico City had said: Vivimos maternando a un montón de gente. (“We live our lives mothering everyone.”) She was neither a wife nor a mother but she and I both knew what was expected of us as women — that our instincts would be to care for others and to seek out love, often at the expense of our interior lives.
The last time I visited Kahlo’s Blue House, which is now a museum, the traveling collection of her clothes and personal items was there. Those items, in part due to a request by Diego Rivera, had remained locked away until 2004, and although I had visited the museum many times, I had never seen the collection. Looking at the steel body braces on display and her handmade embroidered boots, one with a heel much higher than the other to compensate for her shorter leg, reminded me of the extent to which she was trapped in her body. Kahlo had survived polio as a child and later, after a bus accident, broken bones, fractures, a crushed foot, and a pierced abdomen and uterus. Kahlo, so often betrayed by her physical self and defined by her infertility, found solace in her mind, in exploring iterations of her intellectual self. She used painting, fashion, and photography to control her own image, which apparently, to some, made her an “ace manipulator” rather than a woman trying to stretch the boundaries of patriarchal visions of womanhood.
Looking at the steel body braces on display and her handmade embroidered boots, one with a heel much higher than the other to compensate for her shorter leg, reminded me of the extent to which she was trapped in her body.
I didn’t tell the vendor what kind of a woman I was, that I didn’t have a dog or a cat, that the only plants I cared for were cactus, and I had killed some of them. I remembered a quote by Anthony Bourdain from a profile by Patrick Radden Keefe in The New Yorker, one that I had written in my notebook and that had stuck with me both because it reminded me of myself and seemed impossible that a woman could get away with saying something like that: “I’m not there. I’m not going to remember your birthday. I’m not going to be there for the important moments in your life. We are not going to reliably hang out, no matter how I feel about you. For fifteen years, more or less, I’ve been travelling two hundred days a year. I make very good friends a week at a time.” Bourdain was beloved for his obsession with work (which made his personal life messy and complicated) in a way that I don’t think a woman can yet achieve because for us, obsession gets defined as selfishness. In the profile, Keefe went on to describe Bourdain, writing, “Long before he was the kind of international celebrity who gets chased by fans through the airport in Singapore, Bourdain knew how to arrange his grasshopper limbs into a good pose, and from the beginning he had a talent for badassery.” Kahlo also knew how to arrange her broken limbs, and yet so far nobody has described that feat as badassery.
I was in a relationship for a decade, six of those years married, and when my husband left, he said, “You only care about your own projects.” And he was right about that — I do care deeply, obsessively about my own projects, about the curiosity that brings them to life, their creation, planning, and execution. For a year or two after the break-up of our marriage, I debated my worth and what kind of a woman I was, wondering if I should — or could — change. But for better or worse, at my core — the cells and ideas and emotions that give my life meaning — are related to my creative projects which make me feel like a fully engaged participant in the world.
In a letter to her mother, who she addressed as Mamacita Linda, Kahlo wrote, “Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all this. I think work is the best.” The constant in Frida’s life and her sense of purpose was rooted in her painting. Love in the form of men and women came and went. All the while, Kahlo continued reinventing herself through painting.
I was in a relationship for a decade, six of those years married, and when my husband left, he said, “You only care about your own projects.” And he was right about that — I do care deeply, obsessively about my own projects, about the curiosity that brings them to life, their creation, planning, and execution.
***
I wanted to know where the hummingbirds came from. “They usually bring them from Guerrero, but they are from various parts of the republic,” the vendor said, describing how in the old days, kids would kill them with slingshots for pocket money; kill a hummingbird, buy a coke. I imagined that the international black market hummingbird trade had produced more effective ways of killing hummingbirds, but he didn’t elaborate. He did, however, mention that the week prior a vendor sold a baby panda at the market. I found it hard to believe but tucked that information away for later, for another reporting project.
I asked for specifics about the hummingbirds, but he spoke in generalities: “The hummingbird in essence is for love. No matter the size or color: there are some that have a little green breast and there are others that have a little blue one, but it is all the same.” I didn’t like his saccharine, trite or generalized descriptions of love or the way such language was used to sell things. I didn’t like talking about love or talking about seeking it, because seeking love — which is so often tied up with seeking approval — has always been defined as women’s work.
Researchers don’t know the size of the black market hummingbird charm market. Nobody can measure the lack of love in the world and the things that it drives us to do. We are a bundle of wants and needs and insecurities, and in the search for meaning, if the illegal wildlife trade is any marker, we will consume anything to live longer, to be more virile, to attract what we have been told is love.
As I left, a vendor sat in a stall, a cardboard shoebox full of hummingbirds on his lap, one hummingbird mounted on a wire in each hand. These hummingbirds were larger than the rest, their feathers maintained spots of iridescent glory. I imagined Frida, decades ago, in the same market, looking for the hummingbird that she would paint at a time when her painting and her affairs with women and her broken body were not accepted, at a time when she wrote Diego a letter she never sent that said, “I don’t give a shit what the world thinks. I was born a bitch, I was born a painter, I was born fucked.” I understood her rage and feelings of rebellion, for although the world has made space for more diverse women, we are still expected to fill the role of the one who wants to be loved, who wants to be a mother when perhaps we only ever wanted to paint, wanted to write, wanted to explore the world alone, on our own terms.
***
Alice Driver is a freelance journalist and the author of More or Less Dead. She writes and produces radio for National Geographic, Time, CNN, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, Las Raras Podcast and Oxford American.
***
Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Editor: Krista Stevens
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Go Fun Burn Man | Joab Jackson & Michelle Gienow
What happens when the artistically inclined build a
temporary city in the desert? You get 14 radio stations,
two newspapers, and not enough water.
Wednesday, Sept. 2, 1998: "So basically, they're fucked."
The DJ's publicly broadcast profanity is the first act of civil disobedience we experience at Burning Man 1998. In fact, it is the first sign that we have arrived at all. It's 6 P.M. and we're five miles out of Black Rock City, the name given the community set up by and for this ad hoc assemblage of artists, thrill seekers, and various unclassifiable Pagan types.
The "fucked," the DJ explains, are a couple who had bicycled the 130 miles to the Burning Man festival from Reno, Nev., carrying with them only basic on-the-road supplies. They made it OK, but the car that was to follow with their food, water, and sun block for the festival broke down. They need anything and everything, the DJ says.
The Black Rock desert is no place to hang without water-the Burning Man Website urges festival goers to bring one or two gallons per person per day. And the festival site is no vacation park with a water source and a store. The thousands who come (the anticipated '98 crowd turned out to be 15,000) are expected to bring everything they need, including entertainment. At Burning Man, according to the Black Rock Gazette, the festival's daily news-sheet, "survival is an option."
We pay our entry fee ($100 apiece for myself, City Paper contributing photographer Michelle Gienow, her husband Dave Israel, and City Paper cartoonist Tim Krieder) and enter the Black Rock realm. We are part of the evil media, the people Burning Man's organizers are always complaining about. The press, the Burning people contend, misses the point of the festival, coverage of which usually consists of reporters and photographers parachuting in, grabbing a few freak shots, and taking off. "A lot of what passes for journalistic objectivity," festival co founder Larry Harvey says in the Burning Man press kit, "is actually professional alienation."
Perhaps. Then again, maybe there isn't a point to miss. Maybe the TV glare just lays bare the pretensions of grown adults escaping adulthood for a few days. But how could we tell? Harvey urges reporters to arrive early, "to immerse themselves in the story." This was precisely our plan.
Black Rock City is laid out in a semicircle, complete with streets and street signs. In the middle is a space that is largely unoccupied, save for the Burning Man himself-a 50-foot wooden effigy atop a U-shaped support, which will be ritualistically set ablaze at festival's end. The whole setup is wedged in a valley, with mountains reaching up on both sides.
The greeter at the gate tells us the neighborhood to the right is fairly quiet; the one to the left is a bit closer to the action. We go left, staking out a spot on Third Street and Atlantic Avenue. The cracked earth is arid and flat, with nary a plant anywhere. We're on a former lake bed, called "the Playa." And there is dust, a gritty dust that seeps into everything.
We pull in next to a camp which is behind a Ryder truck. Its occupants, Dave and Randy, welcome us to the neighborhood. We jokingly ask about the school system. "Well, we're not crazy about the local education system," Dave says. "But you will get schooled here!"
We set up our camp until it is too dark to continue, and then begin to explore. By day Black Rock City looks like some sort of refugee village, all windblown tents and scattered possessions, but at night the blemishes are hidden. There are 423 registered camps this year and scads of unregistered ones, each with a different theme. In a 1996 Wired magazine article ( "Greetings From Burning Man!"), writer Bruce Sterling described the festival as the Internet made physical. I haven't really gotten what he meant until we walk around at night. Each of these camps is like a Web page, each with a different underlying concept or way of luring you in. (Also like the Internet, getting from one place to another proves to be a difficult, time-consuming task-we are always sidelined by one diversion or another.)
We start on the main road down the north side of Black Rock and encounter the Chapel of the Burning Book--one of the more elaborate exhibits, a towering temple of glass, illuminated so it can be seen from the entire Playa. A few feet down we walk through the Human Wash, a tactile walk-through structure that resembles a car wash but is person-sized (designed by Anthony Bondi, as I later found out). We brush through swatches of fur, rubber balls, and paint brushes. It is quite the sensual experience-so much so that the guy watching over it won't answer any questions, but simply pushes people through and, I suppose, lets the contraption do the talking. "Is it better if I take off my shirt?" Push. "Do we go in sideways?" Push. "What's the name of this?" Push. We also stop by the Mir space-station camp and get free samples of vodka and Tang.
Literally every few yards we encounter something new. We see a guy in a red sequined dress and a woman with breasts painted as headlights. Neither seems out of place. Someone walks by pulling a wagon fitted with a homemade boombox blaring a loop of someone singing part of the song "Moving Around" over and over again. "I'm trying to put people in a trance," he says. We stop by a pavilion set up like a bar where, the barkeep tells us, everything is bartered. And he does mean everything-alcohol, drugs, sex.
"It's like if society were run by artists," Dave Israel observes. "Everything would be great for a week or so, then we'd all die from lack of food and water."
Maybe. But looking over the rugged construction of the Taj Mahal and some of the other camps, it's clear these aren't effete New York artists out here, but the more rugged San Francisco stock. These are artists who sculpt their visions with blow torches.
Thursday, Sept. 3: It's hot. The morning chill around here burns off by 9 A.M. You're left with 90-degree mornings and 100-plus afternoons. Playa heat is not like humid, in-your-face Baltimore heat. It's dry heat, which makes it seem more bearable but is perhaps more insidious because it zaps your energy. The Burning Man Web site's "Survival Guide" advises drinking at least a gallon of water a day.
That afternoon Michelle and I venture over to the Black Rock Gazette. If we're to immerse ourselves in Burning Man, to actually participate, we figure, we'll contribute the best way we know how-through journalism. Well, that's not entirely true-I just want e-mail access, and Michelle needs to recharge her camera batteries-and we figure both can be had over at the Gazette trailer, which has electricity. Publisher Stewart Mangrum, desperate for copy and sensing fresh blood, hands us assignments due that afternoon.
My job is to report on the tiki-torch controversy. Earlier in the week the Black Rock Rangers-Burning Man's cadre of security and medical volunteers-banned the use of tiki torches, which are popular on the Playa, after one camp caught fire from a tiki flame and burned down. There was a fair amount of resistance; a Tiki Liberation Front had formed and sent a proclamation to the Gazette. I am to tour the camp to get the freak-on-the-street response.
It's funny, I muse to Mangrum when I return to the trailer to file my story. Here I am, in a place where I can do virtually anything I want, reinvent myself in any way I wish, and what do I do? The same thing I do at home-write stories. So much for letting my alter ego run free.
I return home from the Gazette about 8 P.M., utterly exhausted. Walking around in the afternoon heat just drained me, and by nightfall I am nearly comatose. I already feel a little burned out on Burning Man. Black Rock City is somewhat like a Busch Gardens-style theme park: The first day is wonderful, but the longer you stay, the more everything sours.
Cruising around that night, we pass the carnival tent, where two jugglers toss around brown balls they claim are feces, inspiring clever audience responses: "Oh shit!" "That's some good shit!" And so on. A few doors down, a photographer is shooting someone with a bowling ball on her head. We tour Bianca's Smut Shack , which is notorious from its Web site; in the flesh, it strikes me as a typical nightclub, albeit one offering toasted-cheese sandwiches, Altoids, and live soft-core sex scenes (two men straddling a woman and licking her neck in front of about 30 onlookers). I'm beginning to suspect that Burning Man's chief product is bad performance art.
I manage to avoid having my brain sucked into submission by the gigantic, cylindrical, pulsating light machine, although others are apparently not so lucky. Housed under a canopy at the city's south end, the machine resembles something out of Tron and attracts a carpet of young hippies, who stare zombie-like into its strobing center. I sit down to rest and wait for Michelle, Dave, and Tim to get bored with this spectacle.
Observing the circle of blank-faced attendees, Tim recalls a comment Stanley Kubrick made about psychedelic drugs. The trouble with hallucinogenics, Kubrick more or less said, is that people taking them can't distinguish an interesting idea from one that just seems interesting.
Friday, Sept. 4: While we were sleeping, an RV hauling a trailer brimming with sound equipment parks in what was our front yard. I think: Just what we need next door, an all-night rave. My head hurts.
This is not the first threat of neighborhood noise. Yesterday afternoon some guy, camping in a black Chevy van down the road, decided to share his budding electric-guitar skills with the whole block, via a portable amp. The sound of bar-chords filled the day. There is a mantra of Burning Man, a rule that ensures a quality experience for all: Don't interfere with anyone else's "experience," Give everyone the space to enjoy themselves in whatever off-the-wall way that they see fit. I understand this precept, but I still was sorely tempted to interfere with his.
In the afternoon, Tim and I decide to test the barter system. No commercial booths are allowed at Burning Man (with the exception of ice sales and the festival's own coffee bar). Michelle gives us a list of sundries to fetch: a lemon, glue, some other stuff.
Whatever his talents as a cartoonist, Tim is a mite rusty as a pitchman. Not that I'm much help. Riding around on bikes, we stop at a camp dedicated to great Finks in history ("Like Barton?" Tim asks. No, like Richard Nixon and Linda Tripp), a couple of S&M; camps, and the Piñata Fuckers Camp, the Web site for which brazenly promised piñata-human interaction but, disappointingly, which offers piñata-to-piñata couplings.
Tim's approach to this whole bartering thing is simple. He offers chapbooks of his comic strip The Pain-When Will It End? for free. That is his entire approach. Understandably most people as yet unfamiliar with his comedic talents are reluctant to part with any valuables in return. While we are tanked on the psychic joy of spreading laughter across the Playa, we don't reap much in return--a few stickers, an application of suntan lotion on our backs, a beer or two at a place that is giving beer away anyway.
At night we go foraging again. At one spot in Black Rock's "neighBARhood" district, Tim asks for a beer and is asked in return, "What do you have to barter?" They are short on the usuals: cigarettes, water, ice (water value-added). Tim self-effacingly replies that he has some humorous drawings in his satchel. The bartender is studying a Pain book with a sort of frownish expression when I finally get fed up and jump in into the transaction. You see, I work at an office where I tend to overhear a lot of sales talk and, for better or worse, I've become familiar with "the hard sell."
"These aren't merely any drawings," I pipe up. "My friend here is modest. They are quite good. In fact, they are printed in a newspaper back east, and most certainly will provide you with many hours of fun."
"Well worth the price of beer," Tim adds.
Caught up in the enthusiasm of our pitch--or just wanting us to shut up--the barkeeps not only give us each a beer but provide refills.
Two lessons here: Even in a communal culture, it is the capitalistic tools that garner the frothy cool ones. And in more than one society, it's the content providers who get the short end of the bartering stick. We got what we wanted, but it took a lot of work.
That evening, we were invited to a chili dinner at Spock Mountain Research Labs. I’ve been trading e-mails with members of this particular clan for awhile, but had never met face-to-face before. It was at an post-dinner jam that I learn perhaps the coolest thing about Burning Man: It’s not the exhibits that make this event. It’s the interactions between people. The often-spontaneous, frequently strange interactions that just could not happen anywhere else on the planet.
Spock Mountain Research Labs, which is a few blocks east of own camp, is run by members of a San Francisco-based 'zine/mailing list called Pigdog. The wood facade, tin overhang, and front porch of this structure looks just like some shack you might imagine lost in the West Virginia mountains. But it is no mere hillbilly shack, they tell me, but a research lab as well. I never quite get why they would build a hillbilly shack research lab, even after listening to the audiotape tour they provide me. The Pigdoggers are of little help; they keep saying it has something to do with "beverage science and leisure technology." When we show up, they’re mostly wearing white lab coats emblazoned with an image of Mr. Spock's head over the three-ring biochemical-hazard symbol.
Dave brought his guitar, figuring to provide entertainment as a sort of repayment for all this good chili. After dinner is finished and the whiskey is passed around, Pigdogger David Cassel pulls out his Casio keyboard, and he and our Dave plays "Honky Tonk Women." People start singing along. Then the two play "The Weight." Soon all of us on the Spock Mountain porch are singing so loudly, so boisterously and so damn drunkenly ("Take a weight off Mamaaaaa!!"), that passers-by are now stopping to view the spectacle.
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Dave slides into a lively bluegrass instrumental, and a guy no one here knows, but who is wearing his own raggedy hillbilly-like hat, jumps on the porch and yells, "That sounds like jigging music!" and commences to jig. I watch in amazement, digging the thematic coincidence, not suspecting it could get any weirder. It does. Dave stops playing for a second and slams his bottle of Jack Daniels on the wood floor. "Anyone who jigs must drink from the bottle," he demands. A cadre of cross-dressers come walking down the dusty road, glittered out to the hilt. When they get to the porch they assemble together and start line-dancing. This bizarre mix goes on for awhile, and at the exact point when the combined excitement of hillbilly jamming, jigging strangers, and synchronized cross-dressers ebbs, a funk wagon—I swear there’s no other way to describe this thing—comes bouncing out from the darkness. It's decorated as a gigantic ghetto blaster, complete with booming speakers. As it is pulled along by two minions, a DJ sits at the helm, spinning irrestible dance music. A little disco ball, hanging from the cart, spins away. (We find out later funk wagon attendees were our neighbors—the one with the RV.) The cart pauses in front of the shack and almost everyone here— hillbillies, cross-dressers, Spock Mountaineers—shake our booties in mad abandon.
It is a moment of almost unbelievable serendipity. Where else in the world would you be at a research lab enjoying jig music accompanied by cross-dressers that dissolves into an instant house party? Dave, who is getting good at coming up with ways to describe Burning Man, thinks of another: It's all the best parties you've ever been to, all 10 feet away from each other.
Saturday, Sept. 5: On an afternoon photographic mission, Michelle is issued a citation by the fashion police for wearing Tevas. I, with my T-shirt bearing the name of an international banking firm and my sideways I'LL PUSH MY FORD BEFORE I DRIVE A CHEVY cap, am beyond the law. Anything goes here, but you must be stylish in your madness.
We stop at Body Boutique, where people can be sprayed with different colors (made from food coloring). It is run by Guido Venturini, who works as an architect the rest of the year. "It's an experiment for a new world," Venturini tells me in a thick Italian accent.
"I always was one color and I only wanted to be another," a blue-soaked Darby Crouch offers.
The sky starts to darken. A dust storm is approaching, but I really must stop by the ominous Nebulous Entity, which has been haunting everyone for an entire week. How to describe this thing? It has five wheels and a sort of twisted, knotty, trunklike base from which a tangle of white metal branches stretches 40 feet skyward. Some branches bud Ken-doll legs, or Pez dispensers. Fiber-optic lines run through the whole thing. Most of the week it has been regurgitating, quite loudly, dissonant noises or obscure pop ditties. I run into the guy who rigged the sound component, a wiry and somewhat haggard-looking young sound scientist named Aaron Wolf Baum. Inside of the mobile creation is a computer with 500 samples of commercials, jingles, TV theme songs, and other aural pop-culture flotsam. As if that isn't enough, there is a microphone people can yell into; the voices are recorded by the computer and added to the random pattern of samples and mixes.
"This is an experiment on an enormous scale," Baum says of Burning Man. "It allows artists to work on very large pieces, and make them very conceptual." The Nebulous Entity is Baum's statement on how we can get caught up in and obsessed by technology. The next day I would understand what he meant.
At 3 P.M. the dark, bilious clouds are approaching at a frighteningly fast clip, so I make my way back to camp. Our setup consists of two tents and a common "shade area," a tarp stretched from Tim's Cherokee over to an open-air tent. It works well enough until the dust storm. Dave directs us each to stand by a pole and make sure our temporary structures don't take off. As the wind and dust roar around us, the pavilion of a neighboring camp blows over and begins journeying westward.
Not everyone is concerned about the storm. At the camp in front of us, as the winds whip around her and her group's tent, a naked woman (I later find out her name is Evelyn) stands and dons a black bustier and striped knee-high stockings. As this scene unfolds, another woman approaches and asks if we know an Alan. She explains that he is her soul mate, as gleaned from a camp that is doing personals. Apparently he lives on our block. We pass around the Alan info sheet the woman obtained from the personals tent, but no bells ring.
Meanwhile the winds subside just enough for the one-chord space-rock band the next block over, which we met earlier in the festival, to start jamming. There is an endless whooping and cheering by people from all over. A mobile living room rides through, with people lounging on its zebra-striped chairs listening to Dick Dale tunes. If the apocalypse ever does strike, we humans will have a great soundtrack for it.
Sunday, Sept. 6: This afternoon I am dead. I sit beneath our tarp to cool off, too tired to move but too hot to sleep. I am sure I've suffered some kind of heat stroke but am too beat down to make it to the medical center. Finally I decide to strike out and seek water of some sort.
I amble down to the Free Mass Shower, a mud pit with a shower head. There is no showering going on, and the guy who seems to be in charge is having a discussion with three bike-riding officials from Washoe County's District Health Department. The shower guy is wearing one of those silly hard hats with two can holders and a straw. But this isn't just some funny-hat-wearing frat boy talking to R. Jeanne Rucker, the official in charge of the Washoe County posse, but a lawyer who appears to know his way around dealing with government officials.
"So you want me to shut this site down. Is that correct?" Beer-Can Mike (as Rucker calls him) asks.
"Yes."
"A lot of people will be disappointed. They are enjoying this."
The trouble, Rucker explains to me, is that the shower uses unpotable water, which could have all sorts of bacteria and thus could cause all sorts of disease, including dysentery. Festivalgoers would likely assume the water is safe, and there are no signs or warnings to the contrary. If people are aware the water isn't drinkable, there wouldn't be a problem.
"So let me get this straight," Mike says. "I let the water drain in the mud and people play in the mud, then that would be OK, but I can't have it hit people first before it hits the ground."
"That's correct."
Water has been a major issue here. The One Tree-a treelike metal sculpture that spews water and is widely used for showers-was closed earlier in the week because it recycled its supply of water, unbeknownst to the people who showered under it. One reliable source is the water truck that comes around once a day, usually in the morning. It drives up one street and down another, wetting the roads to keep the dust down. It didn't take long for people to realize that by following along behind the truck, they can get a good shower. It's even got warm water, having just come from the nearby hot springs.
Depending on which block you catch the thing in, you can find very good company indeed. But after a few days at Burning Man, nudity becomes virtually unnoticeable. I thought being in the presence of more nakedness than I'd ever seen would be odd. How would I talk to some bare-naked sweet young thing? After a few days the answer was obvious: the same way I would speak with her were she wearing clothes. Thus the sight of a bevy of unclothed, laughing, hot-spring-soaked beauties running alongside me to get doused by a water truck is one of those things I didn't really notice and probably won't remember fondly for the rest of my life.
I return to camp at about 4 P.M. The neighbor who lives alone in a pup tent and was painted red when we first saw him is home. This is rare-each morning he bolts from his tent and is not seen again. One day he came back to shave off all of his hair, but that was one of the few times we saw him.
I amble over to chat. His name is Ted Dewberry and he is encrusted in mud. He took a Greyhound bus in from his home in Minneapolis to Reno, from which he planned to bike to Gerlach, the town just outside of the festival site. Near the end of his bike trip he became exhausted and ended up hitchhiking the rest of the way. Still, he arrived nine days before the start of the festival proper. "I was here before anyone," he boasts.
A professional photographer, Dewberry learned of Burning Man from the Internet. What struck him were the images from the festival: "I never seen anything like that before. I just came knowing it would be something completely different." He rubs mud off of a bandage on the top of his head.
"How does your head feel, Ted?" someone from the next camp asks.
"Better than sex," he replies.
"I've been able to do things I've never done before," Dewberry continues. "That in itself is worth it. You don't have to worry about your reputation-what other people here are thinking.
"I just worry what it will be like when I return," he muses, "whether I'll be able to maintain this momentum in the real world."
As night falls-the final night-we feel it's come none too soon. Michelle says she can't take another day, and I can't either. My thighs are chapped, my feet are covered in blisters, and I am dehydrated and in dire need of a long, long, sleep and a shower.
And, I realize, I have failed utterly in my task. There is so much I didn't have time to explore: the Temple of Atonement's Slave Auction, the Radio-Control Demolition Derby, the parade of topless lesbian bicyclists. And there is so much I did experience but don't have the space here to explain: the body boutique; the collection of oil barrels, car doors, ladders, poles, crowbars, air-vent shafts left out for anyone to drum upon. There are a thousand stories in Black Rock City and even Larry Harvey doesn't know them all. The crowd runs the gamut from teenage boys here for the endless parade of tits and drugs to serious artists redefining their worlds. And the only thing that would really bring them together would be the burning of the Man.
On Sunday night Deadheads, Pagans, Goths, Elvis imitators, the cross-dressed, and the undressed all stream down the lantern-lit aisle rambling across the desert toward the Man. Ted is there, painted white, and so is Evelyn, wearing black. Drummers drum. Two gypsies dance lustily atop a golden calf. "Burn the freak, burn the freak," one person yells. "Burn the motherfucker down," shouts another.
The Man is outfitted in purple and red neon. When the mass of people congeals, someone comes out with a torch, and runs it tantalizingly along the soon-to-be Burning Man's legs. A second person comes out and is set on fire in some sort of ritual dance.
Suddenly the Man is burning. I hear later that the flaming guy lit the Burning Man too early, accidentally brushing against the effigy's leg and igniting it; the organizers had little choice but to let him burn then and there, cutting short the ritual buildup. No matter. People are ready for fire.
As the man burns, a tremendous volley of fireworks is loosed from his figure. The desert night is illuminated with a fierce brightness.
It takes only a few more minutes for the figure to collapse into a big, burning pile of rubble. A circle forms around the remains. The Black Rock Rangers keep pushing the crowd away from the fire, but individuals break free and dance up to the flames. Everyone is packed together, flesh and sweat mingling. One woman with a man bowed before her is houting, "I need some room, please give me some room." She takes an eye dropper and carefully squeezes a drop of something into the man's eye. "Anyone else want to be dosed?" she shouts.
A few feet away, an ambulance is ready to haul off the first of a handful of people who've overdosed. (Over the course of the week, the Washoe County Sheriff's Department reports more than 10 drug overdoses, several of which require air evacuation). A guy with a video camera stands behind two emergency medical technicians trying to revive the patients, capturing it all on tape.
Pushed by volunteers, the Nebulous Entity trucks up to the Man, turns around, and, Pied Piper-like, heads back out into the desert, taking with it a stream of followers as it spews out fragments of noise and children's songs: "I am a truck/ a great big truck!" It is truly frightening.
But the fire's primal quality keeps most people nearby. One man dances so close that his latex pants start melting. Ignoring the Rangers' attempts to stop her, Evelyn circles the fire in her bare feet, sometimes walking on hot embers.
What did all of this mean? I have no idea. I walked around the fire asking the people staring into the flames why it was so damn important to burn the Man.
"I really don't know."
"People like to destroy things," one annoyed woman answered curtly.
"It's all about what burns inside you. Like the man's arm fell off, but he kept up, he kept dancing even though he was burning up inside. It's all about dealing with what burns you up."
"It's a Wiccan ceremony. The burning of the man was an offering to the gods for a successful harvest. That's what we're doing, looking for a successful harvest in this changing of seasons."
There's also a lot of talk about throwing things into the fire-burning your fear, as it were. I toss in the T-shirt I'd been wearing all day, the one with the logo of the international banking firm, the credit-card division of which I owed a considerable amount of money (and which advanced much of the cash I used for this trip). I did not feel cleansed, however. I felt cold. Not only was I still in debt, I didn't even have a shirt to wear.
Monday, Sept.7: 6 A.M. I'm leaving the Playa early to catch a flight home. The festival volunteers have their work cut out for them cleaning up the mess left behind in what would turn out to be knee-deep mush created by several days of rain. This morning, though, the sun is appearing and the week-long tribal din has finally subsided. I turn on Radio Free Burning Man. Even the DJ sounds tired and solitary, his commentary punctuated by stretches of dead air.
Burning Man '98: The best party of my entire life, yes, but anything more? What did five days of cooperation and creativity really trump over a lifetime of consumption and passivity? How, exactly, will the harvest be? I certainly will take some creativity back with me, along with the Playa dust caked on all of my belongings. But, like the dust, the influence will probably wash off fairly quickly.
Read Other Burning Man Stories!
But maybe, even after five days of immersion, I'm just the one who doesn't get it. That's the trouble with these kinds of gatherings: It's always hard to distinguish real significance from what only appears significant. Maybe that feeling is the point. In the final analysis, you get out of Burning Man only what you put into it. Which, of course, means everything, and nothing.
"Hope you had a good burn," the DJ says.
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A Day During The Mumbai Monsoon- The Highs And The Lows Of The City
A Day During The Mumbai Monsoon- The Highs And The Lows Of The City
“Mumbai is a beautiful city, but a terrible place” ~ Architect Charles Correa
Mumbai — the city is a hub of entertainment and is warm and welcoming to everyone. It is a megacity and is also the capital of Maharashtra. When you hear the word Mumbai, you instantly think of it as the city of dreams – the city where all your dreams come to life.
On the other hand, Mumbai monsoon is very opposite of what Mumbai is portrayed as. Mumbai monsoon is very clumsy and difficult don’t get me wrong, I love the monsoons when I enjoy it from the comfort of my home sipping my tea but ask me to step out and it’s a different story altogether. So what are the reasons that make Mumbai monsoon pretty but also not-so-welcoming at the same time?
I am a college student. I have been living in Mumbai for the past 16 years and I travel by trains very frequently. Mumbai, like any other place, has its highs and lows. You might see the beauty of Mumbai in a lot of aspects but this year, the citizens have also seen a little bit of downside to the city. Here are the highs and lows of monsoons in Mumbai through my lenses;
Highs:
1. Great Food and Mumbai Monsoon
Mumbai is well known for its street food which is very popular amongst the citizens of Mumbai. Vada Pav has is a staple diet of Mumbaikars. When you are in Mumbai, Vada Pav becomes an important part of your life. No matter how much you deny it, you can never get bored of Vada Pav. Eating Vada Pav during the Mumbai monsoon is even more fun because the weather is cold and humid and nothing feels better than a stall with deliciously smelling Vada Pav. It’s not just Vada Pav, other ‘Mumbai original’ dishes like pav bhaji are also very common these days. The weather makes you so lazy, you don’t feel like cooking anything. That is perfect because then you can go and eat some pav bhaji with your friends and family.
2. Beautiful Scenarios
Monsoon particularly is a very happy season. You get to see such beautiful scenarios as soon as you walk out of your house. There are little puddles everywhere. You can see little kids, with their little paper boats made out of their school notebooks and play with them in the rain. It is the most peaceful thing to look at because you can see how happy these kids are and they are just living in the moment and not caring about if they get sick or if their clothes get dirty. This always reminds me of how we should not stress too much about our future and only live in the present and what happens in our present.
When I go home from college, I often little school kids playing in water puddles jumping and playing with their little paper boats. Sometimes, I have also seen little stray dogs join them in their little fun activities. It reminds me of the days when I was little and I used to play with my friends in water puddles and make little boats.
3. Happy Time With Family
I believe monsoon is the best time to be bonding with your family. sometimes, it is raining so heavily that kids want to skip school and people don’t feel like working and that’s why they often end up taking a leave. At such time, family bonding grows even further. Enjoying some good ‘garam-garam pakoras’ with chai are the best combos during Mumbai monsoon. Having a fun time with family over pakoras/bhajiyas with chai is always a great feeling.
Bhajiya is a common food in my household. My mother always makes bhajiya on Sundays during the monsoon season. And of course, the Pudina chutney is must with these bhajiyas. People usually eat it with tomato ketchup but I always prefer to eat it with pudina chutney
4. Ganesh Chaturthi
We welcome Lord Ganesh at our place every year as we believe in Lord Ganesha. Ganapati is one of those festivals in Mumbai where everyone comes together to celebrate it. The entire Mumbai unites for this sole occasion and celebrates it with much enthusiasm. people often get together for the 11th day of ‘Ganapati Visarjan’ where they immerse the statue of Lord Ganesha in water after worshipping it for 10 days. Since Ganesh Chaturthi usually falls in the month of September which comes under the monsoon season. People ignore the intensity of the climatic condition and go for the ‘visarjan’ anyway because their love for Lord Ganesha is bigger than their fear of climatic conditions.
But Like Every Good Story, Monsoon In Mumbai Has It’s Lows As Well:
1. Water Clogging During Mumbai Monsoon
Life of a typical Mumbaikar depends on local trains. Almost 80% of the citizens rely on the Mumbai local trains because it is the lifeline of the Mumbaikars. Mumbai streets are easily flooded. Since there is a lot of heavy raining in Mumbai monsoons, water gets clogged very easily and there is a lot of water on the railway tracks as well, due to which the trains are blocked and don’t move any further. Water clogging further leads to power cuts because there are loose wires lying around.
Recently, Vasai-Virar faced the biggest problem of water clogging. It started raining on a Friday night and continued to rain at the same pace on Saturday and then Sunday. It did not look like it was gonna stop anytime soon.
The rains continued even on Sunday night and did not stop and then on Monday morning, the water level started rising and reached up to the ankles. Soon, the electricity was cut-off and so was the water supply. Since it was the first day, it was okay and people had no difficulty spending the day. Tuesday, the water level had reached till the waist, People living on the ground floor had to leave their houses and shift to someone else’s homes or live on the terrace of the building. With continuous power and electricity cut, people found it hard to stay in as the phones and other electronics had no charging. The temperature was not too much because of which there wasn’t a lot of problem sleeping at night. By Wednesday evening, the rain died down a little and that is when the water started draining out and the authorities were called for help.
By Thursday, people were back on track with their work lives and students started attending their colleges and schools. These pictures that I have attatched below are clicked by me and my friends. We lived this horror story.
2. Animals’ lives at risk
Stray animals usually find themselves at a loss of help during this time. People are so busy caring about themselves and their problems, it becomes difficult for the stray animals in Mumbai monsoon. Stray animals don’t usually find food at this time of the year because the food gets washed off because of the water. Mumbai monsoon is tough for stray animals.
When I was stuck in Vasai, I saw numerous stray dogs that were stuck because of the water being flooded. They were hungry stranded for so many days.
3. High tides at Churchgate which makes it difficult for people to go there
Marine Drive is the hotspot of people in Mumbai as well as tourists but due to Mumbai monsoon, it is not safe for people to visit at Marine Drive because there is a high tide during monsoon in Mumbai. Because of the high tides, people are warned as to not visit places like Marine Drive, Juhu Beaches, or any beaches for that matter, in order to remain safe. After the 2005 floods, people themselves have become very cautious and have started taking precautions so as to maintain safety.
I have visited Marine Drive so many times that I have lost count. My friends and I, also visit Juhu Beach sometimes because it is close to our college. But we avoid visiting such places during monsoon season because it is never safe to visit such places during monsoon.
4. Not safe food
My mom has strictly asked me to avoid eating outside the house because it may be unhealthy and unsafe and it can lead to diseases and I might get sick. When it comes to a metropolitan city like Mumbai, with vendors at every corner that you turn, you need to be careful. There are many water-borne diseases during Mumbai monsoons and therefore it is safe for you to not eat outside food in order to keep yourself from diseases. Here are some healthy tips that you can follow in monsoons.
What could be pretty becomes a menace. With this article I hope to bring some light to the issues faced by the Mumbai suburbs and outskirts. BMC are you listening?
This article is contributed by Tanya Sharma. She is a 20-year-old BMM graduate residing in Vasai. With this article, she hopes to convey to everyone the difficulties of travelling in Mumbai especially during monsoons.
The post A Day During The Mumbai Monsoon- The Highs And The Lows Of The City appeared first on Maa of All Blogs.
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If you wanted to choose one TV show to seal up in a time capsule intended to explain the 2010s to far future robots who are curious about their human predecessors, you could do a lot worse than Last Man Standing.
The Tim Allen vehicle started out as a mostly innocuous family sitcom when it launched in 2011, a somewhat dated show about an archetypal manly man leading a household full of women. But as it evolved into a series about an older white man’s continued feelings of grievance, it unexpectedly became one of the pop culture artifacts that best predicted the rise of Donald Trump.
Last Man Standing was one of the few shows on television to feature a politically conservative character as its protagonist. Though the views of Mike Baxter, Allen’s character, were more centrist than those of the man who played him, its depiction of intergenerational conflict between Mike and his daughters (and sons-in-law) got at something compelling about a generational divide between (mostly white) parents and children — a divide that few other TV shows even attempted to tackle.
But though the show broached political topics and let Mike wave his conservative flag, its focus was almost never on politics. It was a show about a family who, at the end of every day, still loved each other. Almost as many episodes were about mundane family arguments as they were about big political fault lines.
For all that Allen and former showrunner Tim Doyle — who oversaw the series from season two to season four and shifted it into more political territory — wanted Last Man Standing to be a new All in the Family, the issues that Mike and the rest of the Baxter clan argued about rarely impacted them in any real way. They were insulated in a way that Archie Bunker and company never quite were.
Did the Baxters’ isolation from true political consequences matter? Not even in the slightest. Because in 2017, ABC canceled the show after its sixth season, and it became a political football all the same, after many suspected the show had been canceled due to Allen’s support for Trump. Now, the series is back on Fox after a year off the air, and it’s almost as fascinating as it’s ever been.
The cast of Last Man Standing in its first season. ABC via Getty Images
When Last Man Standing debuted on ABC in October 2011, the press covered the show in one of two ways. The first was both predictable and ephemeral: Last Man Standing would mark Tim Allen’s return to the network that made him famous, where he starred in Home Improvement, one of the biggest hits of the 1990s, from 1991 to 1999.
Indeed, the premise of Last Man Standing almost felt like an updated Home Improvement — instead of hosting a home improvement show and having three sons, Allen’s character would work at a sporting goods store and have three daughters. Around the time of his Home Improvement tenure, Allen had also achieved great success in movies like The Santa Clause (1994) and Galaxy Quest (1999), and even though he’d had a harder time finding hits in the 2000s, after the show had ended, it was still considered a coup that he was coming back to TV at all.
It was the second way that reporters covered the debut of Last Man Standing that turned out to be oddly prescient: They wrote about the show as a sitcom of the so-called “mancession,” part of a wave of comedies that debuted in the 2011–’12 TV season that were about the supposed emasculation of men, compared to the empowerment of women.
Most of the mancession sitcoms are shows whose existence you’ve since forgotten, if you ever knew of them at all — shows like Man Up and How to Be a Gentleman and Work It (in which two men can’t get a job, so they begin cross-dressing as women; it was canceled after two episodes). They were purportedly spurred by an Atlantic article by Hanna Rosin called “The End of Men,” which charted how the Great Recession prompted a collapse in certain male-dominated industries, while industries that employed more women weren’t as gutted.
But the “mancession” sitcoms (save for, I guess, Work It) weren’t really about a decline in men’s employment. They were, instead, about a general sense that masculinity was being infringed upon, that women were ascendant and men descendant, and that society didn’t terribly care what happened to men. As if to drive the point home, the two biggest comedy hits of that fall were about women who were (at least theoretically) doing it for themselves — 2 Broke Girls and New Girl.
Last Man Standing survived because it starred Tim Allen, more or less. The premise of its first season — a man feels overwhelmed by all of the women in his life and isn’t sure he has the room to be a man anymore — was thin, as these things go. The show was created by 30 Rock writer Jack Burditt, and he might have eventually made something of it. But a family tragedy led to him leaving the show, and Last Man Standing drifted aimlessly through its first season, losing half of its premiere audience. It seemed like a solid candidate for cancellation, like all of the other mancession shows.
Last Man Standing had a good cast, but it never seemed to gel. Allen frequently seemed bored, and the idea that white men were being subjugated in a way they never had previously was mocked by critics and journalists. The show managed a season two renewal, but it was banished to Fridays (It had been on Allen’s old Tuesday night haunt.) Even as it was renewed, it felt unlikely that it would ever see a third season. And then it hired Tim Doyle.
Mike’s relationship with his grandson — and the father who abandoned said grandson — drives much of Last Man Standing’s emotional spine. ABC via Getty Images
Doyle is one of those journeymen showrunners who are brought in on troubled productions in an attempt to salvage them. Usually, it doesn’t work because there’s too much water under the bridge. But in the case of Last Man Standing, Doyle and Allen were on the same page, which made things easier. And what they wanted to do was make the show more like All in the Family.
Their first order of business was to import the ’70s sitcom’s most obvious source of conflict — a constant political battle of the wills with a know-it-all lefty son-in-law. The foundation was conveniently already in place, thanks to an unspoken bit of Last Man backstory: Mike’s oldest daughter, Kristin (Alexandra Krosney in season one; Amanda Fuller in all seasons thereafter), had gotten pregnant in high school, and was now raising her son as a single mother, with the backing of her parents.
So season two brought Kristen’s ex-boyfriend, Ryan (Jordan Masterson), back into the fold. Thus, Mike’s grievances about Ryan letting down Kristin and their child by skipping town were papered over with fights about Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and the personal subsumed into the political. It was a smart way to be like All in the Family but put a different spin on the material.
But the show also began sharpening its other conflicts by transforming Mike into a somewhat reactionary old-school conservative, who loved being a guy’s guy and believed in rugged self-determination. Then it made everybody else in his circle not so sure about his positions, to varying degrees.
To its credit, the show attempted to seriously explore these conflicts, as when youngest daughter Eve (Kaitlyn Dever) expressed an interest in the military, and both Mike and his wife Vanessa (Nancy Travis) worried what might happen to her, or when Ryan objected to his son taking part in a school play that featured negative stereotypes of Native Americans, only for the story to pivot to the characters wondering if his sudden return to his son’s life was sincere, or if he’d just flake out again.
Still, I don’t want to oversell Last Man Standing. It often just had its characters shout political talking points at each other — though that might have honestly been a fairly accurate depiction of 2010s political arguments. And there were times when it inadvertently ended up making arguments like, “A little bullying can be good!” when it really seemed as if it were trying to argue the opposite.
But at its best, the new Last Man Standing was one of only a few pieces of pop culture in the 2010s that really dug into how many older Americans (mostly white and mostly male) looked at the waves of change coming up from younger folks — often from their own kids — and reacted with a slack-jawed, “Wait. Why do I have to change?” The topics that it tackled, from spanking to gun control to political correctness, felt eerily like a sitcom rehearsal for the grievances that would drive the 2016 presidential campaign.
And the show balanced Mike’s point-of-view against that of its other characters. Yes, because he was the protagonist and because he was played by Tim Allen, he got the most time on the soapbox. But he usually learned a thing or two by episode’s end, if only to keep the family peace. (Doyle has said that Allen mostly wanted to get to speak conservative talking points — he honestly didn’t care if Mike “won” the argument in the end, because he intuitively knew there would be people who just wanted to see a conservative on TV.)
What ultimately kept Last Man Standing from true greatness, to my mind, was the simple fact that for Mike and his family, many of the debates they engaged in were strictly theoretical. They had plenty of money from Mike’s job at the outdoor store and Vanessa’s work as a geologist (and later a teacher). They were all white, save for a couple of Mike’s friends. They were all cisgender and heterosexual (so far as we know to this point).
There’s nothing wrong with making a show about characters who are firmly entrenched in positions of privilege and power. (If there was, we’d have to get rid of most of the shows on TV.) But it sometimes felt as if Last Man Standing’s characters were arguing about politics just to argue about something, not because they cared passionately about any given issue. They didn’t have actual skin in the game, unlike Archie Bunker and his family, who really did struggle with money or the labor union or Archie’s bone-deep prejudices.
And like so many other sitcoms about politics, Last Man Standing used the issues of the day as a convenient wedge to reliably divide its central family so it could reaffirm their essential bond at the end of every episode. The results could be genuinely sweet, but the approach meant the show treated politics as a MacGuffin. It wasn’t really about politics so much as it was about the primacy of family, and the idea that there’s nothing you can’t overcome if you love each other enough (and if you have a fair amount of money). And even after Doyle departed the show at the end of season four, that’s held true.
That’s why it’s been so weird to see Last Man Standing become a political football.
This look doesn’t really work for Tim. ABC via Getty Images
When ABC canceled Last Man Standing in the spring of 2017, after its sixth season, many people were genuinely surprised. The show had grown to become ABC’s second most-watched sitcom after only Modern Family; season six was its best-rated season since its first, and it found a warm reception in syndication, where reruns routinely ranked well on the weekly charts.
But from another perspective, the show’s cancellation made some degree of sense. Though the show had grown in total viewers, it had actually slumped slightly among the younger viewers advertisers most care about. And the series wasn’t produced by ABC Studios, the network’s in-house production unit. Instead, it hailed from 20th Century Fox, so ABC had to pay another company entirely to air the show.
Considering that Last Man Standing starred a big-name actor and was entering its seventh season (when cast salaries begin to get more and more expensive), it was only going to cost the network more and more money for what was ultimately a modest hit. Looking at the show in terms of ABC’s bottom line, canceling it made sense.
Yet when the cancellation was announced, plenty of people jumped to another conclusion: The show had been axed because Tim Allen was a Trump supporter, and he played one on TV.
Now, compared to, say, Roseanne Barr, Allen’s Trump support has been more of the, “Let’s just give him a chance!” variety, save for the time he compared being a Trump supporter in Hollywood to, uh, living in 1930s Germany. (That one made people mad — and it came just a couple of months before Last Man Standing’s cancellation.)
But considering that Last Man Standing was a show about a guy feeling aggrieved by how the world was changing right in front of him, with an audience of people who would type in all caps about how they agreed with the character and/or the man playing him in Deadline comments sections about the series, it wasn’t too hard for many to jump to the conclusion that Allen, one of the few open Trump-supporting celebrities out there, was being silenced.
What was especially weird about this response was the fact that in the wake of the 2016 election, Last Man Standing had subtly backed off of politics, almost as if it could sense that there wasn’t a good way to have Mike do a victory dance or something of that nature without turning off somebody (if only his own kids).
Instead, the show doubled down on stories about the family, throwing in a couple of social issues storylines — like one where Mike and Vanessa wondered why their daughters no longer went to church — but mostly focusing on conflicts among the three Baxter kids. Indeed, what turned out to be the de facto series finale for the year the show was off the air was an episode about Mike’s middle daughter, Mandy (Molly Ephraim, in a quietly genius performance), shadowing him at work and some of the characters joining a kickboxing class. High political theater it was not.
And yet the idea that Tim Allen had gotten his show canceled simply by speaking out persisted, no matter how many times the star insisted it was a business decision on the part of ABC. (To some degree, the anger over the cancellation helped the series return, since it kept its profile high while it was off the air.)
So to many people, it didn’t matter that, when Fox picked the show up in the same week that it canceled a number of shows known as more progressive-leaning series — especially Brooklyn Nine-Nine — it was also a business decision, since Fox, after all, owns Last Man Standing, at least for now. (You can read a lot more about all of this here.) In their minds, the narrative where the show was an embattled series about a conservative character, one that ultimately won the resurrection it deserved, made a lot more sense.
But even if Last Man Standing is a little overblown as a political football, the first two episodes of its new seventh season (which debuts tonight at 8 pm Eastern on Fox) make clear that it’s finally become a much more interesting series about a topic it’s always flirted with: masculinity.
The gang is … mostly back in season seven. Fox
In the genuinely affecting second episode of Last Man Standing’s new season, Mike is forced to confront the fact that he has deeply buried the grief he feels over the death of a loved one — both because he misses that person and because he never had a great relationship with them. He’s mourning not only the relationship he had, but the one he could have had, if he and the late loved one had just been open about their feelings.
And the story expands from there: Has Mike’s inability to express himself emotionally hurt his ability to be a father to his girls? Yes, they know he loves them — but, also, do they? None of these questions are all that unusual for a family sitcom to tackle. But Last Man Standing has reached a point where its more emotional and dramatic moments work better than its comedic ones, which are increasingly just a series of moments where Mike chortles about the results of the last election.
There are plenty of things that don’t work about the new episodes, including a lengthy prologue to the season premiere that involves all of the characters talking about how their favorite show has been canceled, but maybe it will be picked up by another network, etc., etc., etc.
And that’s to say nothing of the recasting of Mandy, since Ephraim is now busy with other projects, a development that is also addressed via several strained meta-jokes. (Mandy’s now played by Molly McCook, who is very, very different in the part. That’s the only judgment I feel comfortable making for now.)
Dever, too, has opted not to return to the show full-time, though she will guest-star in a handful of episodes. And Eve, at least, is off at the Air Force Academy, so it makes sense she’s only around occasionally.
But throughout both episodes Fox sent out for review, there are moments when it really does feel as if Last Man Standing is attempting to confront what it means to be someone who is glad Trump is president but also starting to realize how much that scares other people in your family.
The show still falls back on, “Hey, let’s not let politics come between us! We’re a family!” as its solution to almost everything. But Mike, at times, seems almost like he’s genuinely worried about his son-in-law, who contemplates moving back to Canada, he’s so anxious. It’s almost a big step for the character.
There’s also a clear willingness to delve back into the show’s original premise and confront the ways in which it comes up short. Last Man Standing is still interested in the rituals of male bonding and the ways that guys shoot the shit when they’re alone together. But there’s also a growing sense that Mike might be more of a softy than he lets on, or that the character is becoming aware of his responsibility to the larger world.
Last Man Standing is never a show I want to over-praise. It still makes incredibly crass jokes (in these first two episodes, said jokes include cracks about the family separations carried out at the border), and its characters continue to live in a giant bubble of their own privilege that the show doesn’t dare contemplate. But if the last half of the show’s final season on ABC felt as if the show had looked at Trump’s election and blinked, then these first two episodes, while they don’t quite engage with that world head-on, do, at least, try to find a sideways window into what it means to be alive today.
Last Man Standing has never been a perfect show, and at many points in its run, I wouldn’t have even called it a good show. But it has always tried its damnedest to be an honest show. The deeper it gets, the more it feels like the connections among its characters matter, and the more it seems to interrogate whether the way Mike has lived his life has let him have as full an experience of that life as possible.
Last Man Standing is never going to be as courageous as it thinks it is — but it keeps tiptoeing toward some greater understanding of itself and its characters. Those baby steps make all the difference.
Last Man Standing returns Friday, September 28, on Fox at 8 pm Eastern.
Original Source -> Last Man Standing perfectly encapsulates the 2010s, for better and for worse
via The Conservative Brief
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It’s the culmination of a 25-year effort to grapple with the reality of slavery in the home of one of liberty’s most eloquent champions.
The life it represents was anything but. The newly opened space at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s palatial mountaintop plantation, is presented as the living quarters of Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who bore the founding father’s children.
But it is more than an exhibit.
It’s the culmination of a 25-year effort to grapple with the reality of slavery in the home of one of liberty’s most eloquent champions. The Sally Hemings room opens to the public Saturday, alongside a room dedicated to the oral histories of the descendants of slaves at Monticello, and the earliest kitchen at the house, where Hemings’ brother cooked.
The public opening deals a final blow to two centuries of ignoring, playing down or covering up what amounted to an open secret during Jefferson’s life: his relationship with a slave that spanned nearly four decades, from his time abroad in Paris to his death.
To make the exhibit possible, curators had to wrestle with a host of thorny questions. How to accurately portray a woman for whom no photograph exists? (The solution: casting a shadow on a wall.) How to handle the skepticism of those who remain unpersuaded by the mounting evidence that Jefferson was indeed the father of Hemings’ children? (The solution: tell the story entirely in quotes from her son Madison.)
And, thorniest of all, in an era of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo: How to describe the decadeslong sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemings? Should it be described as rape?
“We really can’t know what the dynamic was,” said Leslie Greene Bowman, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. “Was it rape? Was there affection? We felt we had to present a range of views, including the most painful one.”
After a DNA test in 1998, the nonprofit foundation, which owns Monticello, determined that there was a “high probability” that Jefferson fathered at least one of Hemings’ children, and that he likely fathered them all. The new exhibit asserts Jefferson’s paternity as a fact.
The “Life of Sally Hemings” exhibit is perhaps the most striking example of the sea change that has taken place at Monticello, as the foundation has increasingly focused on highlighting the stories of Monticello’s slaves. The foundation has embarked on a multiyear, $35 million project aimed at restoring Monticello to the way it looked when Jefferson was alive. It rebuilt a slave cabin and workshops where slaves labored, and has hosted reunions there for the descendants of the enslaved population, including sleepovers. It removed a public bathroom installed in 1940s atop slave quarters.
And it is phasing out the popular “house tour” of the mansion, which made only minimal mention of slavery alongside Jefferson’s accomplishments, radically changing what is experienced by the more than 400,000 tourists who visit Monticello annually.
Thanks to a short description given by one of Jefferson’s grandsons, historians believe that Hemings lived in the slave quarters in the South Wing. But they aren’t sure which room. Curators decided to tell Hemings’ story in one of the rooms. Instead of making it a period room with objects that she might have possessed, they left it empty, projecting the words of her son Madison on the wall to tell her story.
The 1995 movie “Jefferson in Paris” imagined that Hemings and Jefferson loved each other. But no one knows how they really felt. Their sexual relationship is believed to have started in France, where slavery was outlawed. Hemings wanted to remain in Paris, where she could have been granted freedom, but she eventually returned to Virginia with Jefferson after he offered her extraordinary privileges and freedom for any children she might have, according to an account by Madison Hemings. Her children, who were all fair-skinned and named after Jefferson’s friends, were freed when they reached adulthood.
No portrait or photograph exists of Hemings. Even her skin tone remains a mystery, and a source of controversy. Cartoons in the 18th century, which aimed to derail Jefferson’s political career, portrayed her as dark-skinned. But her father was a white plantation owner and her mother, an enslaved woman, was of mixed race. One account described Hemings as “mighty near white.” Curators at Monticello opted not to recreate a physical image of her. Instead, they will project a woman’s shadow on a wall.
At a time when sexual abuses by powerful men have dominated the news, curators struggled for months over how to describe the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson — and in particular whether to use the word “rape” in the exhibit. The foundation held conference calls and meetings with historians, board members and descendants to discuss the question.
“There are a lot of people who believe rape is too polarizing a word,” said Niya Bates, a public historian at Monticello. “But it was a conversation that we knew we could not avoid. It’s a conversation the public is already having.”
In the end, historians opted to use the word “rape” with a question mark, knowing that some would criticize them for including the word, while others would have criticized them for leaving it out.
The question is asked on a plaque on the wall outside the Hemings exhibit titled “Sex, Power and Ownership.” It spells out the power dynamic between the two: Under Virginia law, Hemings was Jefferson’s property.
Curators acknowledged that the question could be difficult for some visitors to digest, especially schoolchildren.
“We’re still having a little heartburn” about the placement of the plaque, Bates said.
Lucia “Cinder” Stanton, a retired historian who spent 25 years collecting oral history from the descendants of slaves at Monticello, said it remains to be seen how the public will react at a time when political views have become so extreme.
“The words ‘rape’ and ‘rapist,’ what it conjures up is not a nuanced situation,” she said. “There were other relationships like theirs which were clearly love matches.”
Some couples moved to Ohio, where slavery was outlawed, she said, adding: “Jefferson wasn’t that. But he wasn’t violently accosting Sally Hemings every day for 30 years.”
At reunions of the descendants of Monticello’s slaves, the question of whether Jefferson is guilty of rape has sparked heated arguments.
“I really don’t think slaves had a choice,” said Rosemary Medley Ghoston, a retired hairdresser in Ohio who discovered in the 1980s, through genealogical research, that she was a descendant of Madison Hemings. “Maybe if it was not rape, it was a duty that she had to fulfill.”
But her distant cousin, Julius “Calvin” Jefferson, whom she met at a descendants’ event, feels differently.
“I think it was a love story,” he said, noting that Hemings was the half sister of Jefferson’s late wife, Martha, whose death had devastated him. “Did she look like Martha? I think she did.”
The exhibit has divided the white descendants of Jefferson’s acknowledged family, and stoked outrage among a small but determined group of Jefferson enthusiasts who insist that he didn’t father Hemings’ children.
“The charge is an extremely serious charge against him,” said Mary Kelley, a sculptor from Chevy Chase, Maryland, who took a tour of Monticello in 2013 and was shocked by what she considered to be the guide’s negative tone about a man she has always idolized.
Afterward, she joined the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, a group that was formed to dispute the growing historical consensus that Jefferson fathered Hemings’ children.
Now Kelley hunts down clues about who else could have fathered Hemings’ children and writes articles criticizing the plans for the Sally Hemings exhibit. She even created an artistically rendered drawing of the DNA used in the 1998 paternity test, and plans to attend a coming conference in Charlottesville, where heritage society members will share papers they have written.
“Some nights I just curl up in the semidark and just read his letters,” she says of Jefferson. “He just doesn’t seem to be a person who would do this.”
John H. Works Jr., a descendant of Jefferson’s who is among the founding members of the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, accuses the nonprofit organization that runs Monticello of bowing to political correctness, and insists that the entire premise of the exhibit is flawed.
But his brother, David Works, who has embraced the descendants of slaves at Monticello as “cousins,” attended a special viewing Friday to celebrate.
“They are actually showing it as it was,” he said.
Annette Gordon-Reed, a history professor at Harvard University whose book, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” helped bolster Monticello’s transformation, said that it would take time for people to accept the changes.
“Some people come here and say, ‘I didn’t come here, to a slave plantation, to hear about slavery,'” she said. “There’s nothing to do but keep pushing back.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
FARAH STOCKMAN and GABRIELLA DEMCZUK © 2018 The New York Times
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