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luxekook · 4 years

Text

chapter seven.

⇥ pairing: ot7 x reader

⇥ genre: college au with fluff, smut & angst

⇥ summary: a series in which the reader meets (and falls for) seven members of the Beta Tau Sigma (BTS) fraternity

⇥ word count: 3.6k

⇥ warnings: 18+, lots of cursing, general chaotic energy, poly relationship, a short confrontation, mentions of slut-shaming, switch!reader, dom!joon, switch!jin, sub!jimin, library shenanigans, an abundance of coffee, punishments, spanking, bad puns (jin is in this chapter, DUH), many nerd references uwu

Chapter Seven

Quinn Library – 3:54pm

The end of September passes in a blur of studying, partying, volunteering, and spending time with friends. The month’s conclusion also includes the increasing presence of seven boys in my everyday routine.

Since giving Taehyung the suck of his life in the bathroom of Hannigan’s, I have been basically fighting off the seven of them for a moment to breathe. But, sometimes breathing is overrated when being smothered by affection.

Going from being single to essentially dating seven people is quite the adjustment. I found myself growing attached to them – something that both excited and scared the shit out of me. We haven’t discussed labels or anything, but I figure it’s only a matter of time. The boys have apparently been planning an elaborate first date for this upcoming weekend, and I feel like they’ll probably ask to make it official then.

My stomach erupts in butterflies at the thought, and I take a calming breath. No need to overthink such things.

While it might be unconventional by some societal standards, polyamory is simply a way to love. Why should love come with confines? With binary expectations? The saying ‘love is love’ gets thrown around a lot, but I believe it bears repeating.

Jenni and Luna have been nothing but supportive to me over the past two weeks. They even came with me to volunteer this past weekend because they - and I quote - wanted to ‘check out our vibe’. But, I wholeheartedly expect that the real reason had actually been for them to feel out the boys’ intentions.

Why did I suspect this? Well, because Jungkook had come up to me within the first fifteen minutes at the worksite quivering in fear over how ‘scary my friends were’ and how ‘Jenni had cornered him to interrogate him while Luna hovered behind her, menacingly holding a nail-gun’.

I had never felt more loved and supported by my friends.

My phone dings, and I quickly hasten to put it on silent, shooting an embarrassed and apologetic look around the library. It seems like most people have headphones in, and I let out a sigh of relief. No one wants to be that one loud person in the library.

Checking my notifications, I smile when I see it’s a SnapChat from Hobi in the group chat the boys created a few weeks ago. My thumb swipes it open, and I barely contain myself from announcing to the whole library how vibrantly handsome one of my potential boyfriends is.

I quickly send a SnapChat back of me and my stack of books in the library with the caption ‘send help in the form of coffee’.

Immediately, Taehyung sends a flurry of heart eyes emojis in the chat, Jungkook sends a ‘noona is so cute’, and Yoongi sends back a picture of a black screen with the caption ‘come nap with me’.

God, I would love to nap with Yoongi right now… Alone time with the older boy is so elusively precious. One day last week at their house, I had mentioned wanting to learn piano. Yoongi had just grabbed my hand and tugged me to his room. We had spent a couple hours together in the small corner of his room playing on his keyboard.

Well, he had been playing; I had been fumbling around like a buffoon - half uncoordinated in general and half flustered by how good Yoongi looked playing. His hands had been so nimble as they flew over the keys, crafting melodies I could only assume he had composed. His focus had been so fucking hot as he nodded slightly along to the tempo in his head, his eyes shooting over to look at me every once in a while.

My hand kink? Activated.

My willpower to not kiss the shit out of Yoongi? Nonexistent.

When Yoongi had paused in between songs, I may or may not have grabbed him by his shirt collar and kissed him. His blushing attempt to dodge me had been so cute; and when I had stopped trying to kiss him, he had pouted and then kissed me instead.

What a cutie…

A giggle draws my attention from my reminiscing. At first, I pay it no mind, taking it as a directive to dive back into my studies. But then, the whispering starts.

“I heard she’s fucking her way through the whole house.”

“Isn’t there a term for that?”

“Yeah, a frat rat.”

I slam my 500-page textbook closed and stand, leveling the duo of gossiping girls with a glare that could make grown men cry. It had before when I had to properly eviscerate my uncle in defense of feminism at our last family gathering. What a time that had been.

“Is there a problem?” I force the question through gritted teeth, stalking over towards their nearby table. I relish in the way they gape at me, eyes wide and pupils quivering, “I’m sorry. I’m afraid my complaint jar is at capacity. Please don’t try again later.”

The girl on the right gulps, “No-nope, there’s no problem! We were just leaving. Right, Janika?”

“No,” The girl who had called me a ‘frat rat’ just moments before crosses her arms and stands, “I do, like, have a problem.”

“Janika,” The other girl tugs on the sleeve of the one standing, “Don’t.”

“Yeah, Janika,” I smile, “Don’t.”

I can see the moment she snaps.

“You’re, like, such a fucking bitch! I don’t know what they all see in you. Oh wait, yes I do. You’re fucking easy.”

I consider myself to be a patient person, but having to endure this type of rant against my character - and against women’s sexual freedom in general - has pushed me well past my limits.

“Now, listen here, Janika,” I take another step forward, “You can keep talking your shit. I really don’t give a flying fuck what you think about me. But I really advise you to google ‘how to stop slut-shaming for dummies’ because it seems like you need a crash course.”

Janika’s face darkens, “Whatever. They’ll get tired of you anyway.”

“Yeah,” I let out an amused laugh, “I’m sure they’ll get real tired of me choking on their dicks every night.”

Letting out a gasp, Janika whirls back around to face her silent friend, “Let’s go. I don’t want to, like, be around her any longer.”

“Buh-bye now,”I wiggle my fingers in their direction as they shuffle out of the library.

Smiling in satisfaction, I head back towards my table. Without hesitation, I gather my books and belongings and head upstairs to the quiet floor. Any more distractions or confrontations would probably make my blood pressure pop off the charts.

The quiet floor, as one of my safe havens, is home to several small private study rooms. Peering into each, I start to lose hope that any would be available. Finally, the very last room proves me wrong, and I swing open the door and almost in tears over the sweet, sweet solitude.

This particular study room is tucked away in the very far corner of the library’s second floor. Not many people are aware of its location, and it seems that paid off for me today. Plopping my things down across the table in the center of the tiny room, I follow suit and drop down into one of the two chairs adjoining the table.

What a clusterfuck of an afternoon… This sadly isn’t the first time I’ve heard some comments being made about my association with the BTS boys, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last. Yet, part of me knew all along that this would be the trade-off.

After all, what are a few irrelevant opinions to seven gorgeous and loyal partners? Inconsequential - in my opinion. That is the reason why I haven’t breathed a word of the backlash to anyone.

Sighing, I flip open my textbook to where I had been before being rudely interrupted.

The amygdala plays a key role in emotion and behavior…

“Noona?”

I jump a half-mile out of my chair, slapping a hand over my pounding heart. Jimin had somehow managed to enter the room without my knowledge. Had he fucking teleported?

Holding a giant iced coffee in one hand and a cinnamon bun in the other, Jimin beams at me and ignores the fact he just scared the living shit out of me. “Hi, noona! I saw your SnapChat while I was in class, and I came here as soon as I could.”

I stare dumbfounded at the angel before me. Jimin is slightly out of breath with reddened cheeks and a sweaty brow. His black track-pants are slung low on his hips, his long-sleeve white t-shirt clings to his torso, his black duffle bag thrown carelessly over one shoulder. He must have run over straight from dance class.

Standing abruptly, I stalk over to where Jimin is still posted up by the doorway to the study room. Toe to toe with him, I blurt out while still half in a daze, “You really brought me coffee and food?”

He eyes me warily like I might suddenly jump on him at any moment. Shifting his weight back and forth, Jimin hesitantly replies, “Um, yes?"

I take the coffee and cinnamon bun from his hands, place them on the table, and then tackle him with the biggest hug. "You absolute sweetheart!" I murmur into the crook of his neck, "This made my day. Thank you, Jimin-ie."

His hands tentatively wrap around me, pulling me closer. "You're welcome, noona. I just wanted to do something nice for you.”

“Well, I really appreciate it, baby,” My lips brush over the crevice of his collarbone and relish in his shudder. Bringing my head up to face his, I smile widely at him, “Can I kiss you, Jimin-ie?”

“Yes,” He sighs out, eyes already closing in anticipation. I press my lips to his, still smiling softly against his mouth. His lips are plush under mine, velvety soft. My tongue swipes across his bottom lip and— Is that coffee I taste?

I pull back, “Jimin, did you sip my coffee on your way here?”

The boy looks rightfully alarmed, “I– y-yes. But only a little, noona!”

Cute.

“Hmm,” I trail my fingers down his chest, “I guess I’ll make an exception for you this time since you were the one to bring it for me.”

Jimin relaxes slightly, but his expression is strangely disappointed. I stare at him quizzically, and he blushes.

“What is it?” I lean against the table, facing him.

He clears his throat, staring intensely at the ground, “You can still punish me if you want, (y/n)-noona.”

My eyebrows shoot upwards at his offer, and then I let out a slight chuckle, “Oh, Jimin… That would be a favor to you, wouldn’t it? My baby boy wants to be punished, hm? Did dance practice make you all hot and bothered? Jungkook tells me that has been happening to you lately.”

Jimin’s face explodes in color as he mutters, “That little bitch will pay for this.”

Suddenly, the door swings open with a resounding thud, nearly clipping Jimin in the shoulder.

“Your savior has arrived!” Kim Seokjin announces loudly in spite of the studiously silent atmosphere of the quiet floor. His hands hold two steaming hot travel mugs, which I can only guess are filled with the elixir of the gods (aka coffee).

Seokjin’s eyes glance around the room as he takes in the fact that I’m not alone as he obviously had expected. “Wait, Jimin-ie? What are you doing here?” Jin’s eyes flick down to the coffee and cinnamon roll that lay on the table. “Goddamn it!”

“You were too slow, hyung,” Jimin smirks happily as he takes a seat in the chair I had previously vacated. He slouches smugly as he stares up at the fuming older boy.

“Too slow?!” Jin roars.

“Jin,” I chastise, circumventing around him to shut the door.

“Sorry, babe,” Seokjin says while still glaring daggers at the all-too-pleased Jimin. Suddenly, his expression changes into a sneaky look that makes me both want to run and jump his bones. “Well,” He waves the two coffee mugs around in the air, “I made these myself - with love. I didn’t buy that generic shit; I brewed it, baby.”

It’s Jimin’s turn again to look disgruntled, and I can’t help but laugh at their antics.

“Any and all coffee is appreciated and loved by me – the more the merrier. So, thank you both,” You say, taking one of the travel mugs from Seokjin. Kissing his cheek, you turn back to sit opposite Jimin at the table.

“She kissed me on the lips!” Jimin bursts.

“Park Jimin!” I cry as Jin splutters some sort of incoherent rant about fairness and equality.

Jimin holds eye contact with me, still leaning back in his chair like he’s the king of the fucking universe. But, he’s not; I am.

My chair hits the wall behind me with a bang as I stand, planting my hands on the table to loom over Jimin. “Do you think it’s fun to push your hyung, Jimin? Does it amuse you to be a little shit?”

I can see the moment that Jimin decides to be a brat. His eyes heat up in a challenge, and he firmly answers, “Yes, noona.”

“Get up.” The change in my tone is apparent. Jimin gulps. Getting to his feet, he stares back at me expectantly.

“Jin,” I address the older boy while still maintaining eye contact with Jimin, “What kind of punishment do you think I should give our Jimin here?”

Seokjin rounds my other side, grinning, “Well, (y/n) darling, I believe he should get spanked.”

“Interesting choice,” I murmur, turning to face Jin, “That’s what you’re going to get then.”

“What?” Jin squawks, arms waving rapidly around in the air, “But I didn’t do anything!”

“Nothing is what you should have done, Jin,” I push him against the wall, “You know better than to let Jimin rile you up like this.”

Those plump lips of his pout dramatically as he whines, “But, (y/n)…”

“But nothing,” I say and then whirl around to face the other boy. He’s still standing where I left him with his eyes glued to the pair of us. “Jimin,” I hold his gaze, “You’re going to watch. You’re not going to touch yourself, your hyung isn’t going to touch you, and I’m not going to touch you.”

His eyes widen comically, “No! That’s not fair!”

“Do you want to be gagged, too, baby boy?” I ask, cocking my head slightly. Seeing his emphatic head shakes, I grin. “That’s what I thought. Now, stay.”

Turning back to Jin, I smirk slightly as I ask, “Punishment now or later?”

Seokjin’s eyes scrunch cutely in confusion, “What?”

“You see,” I move closer to him, my body brushes his, “I think you earned a punishment, but I think you also earned helping me punish Jimin.”

A wide grin crosses Jin’s face as he glances back at the corner Jimin is stewing in. “I would be honored to help you punish him, babe.”

“That’s what I figured,” I smile briefly at him before slowly sliding my hands up his chest to rest on the nape of his neck. Holding them there, I press the lightest of kisses to the corner of his lips.

Jin’s breath hitches in his throat.

I run my tongue against the seam of his mouth, taking my time and savoring the sweet taste of him. His lips part to let me in, my tongue sliding across his. I grind against him as we kiss, moving my hips in such a way that makes him groan and lean back harder against the wall.

“What the fuck is going on in here?”

Ripping my mouth from Jin’s, I turn to face the newcomer.

Namjoon stands in the doorway holding yet another cup of coffee, his face thunderous. "What do the three of you think you're doing? This is the goddamn library, you heathens!”

Seokjin jumps out of his skin in fright, pushing me away faster than I can anticipate. Stumbling back, I crash into Jimin – who apparently had ventured out of his assigned corner. Brat.

“The shades were open!” Namjoon continues to rant as he flicks the aforementioned item down to cover the door’s window, “Did you want people to see you?”

He reads the expression on my face correctly, “Oh, but you did, didn’t you, (y/n)?” Namjoon approaches where I’m still captured in Jimin’s embrace. Glaring down at me, he taunts, “So quick to stake your claim; but, make no mistake, they were mine first.”

Shaking out of Jimin’s hold, I straighten, raising my chin to meet Namjoon’s gaze full-on, “That’s interesting. I didn’t realize you were so lenient with your partners.”

Jimin makes a choking noise behind me. Jin stands behind Namjoon, waving a hand in front of his throat to clearly tell me to stop talking. I keep going, “Perhaps I need to teach you how to discipline.”

Namjoon flips me around, shoves Jimin out of the way, and bends me facedown across the table.

“Jin,” He says, his voice growly, “Stand in the hall and let me know if you can hear us.”

The sound of the door opening and closing alerts me that Jin followed Namjoon’s instructions without a word.

“Jimin,” He continues, “Hold (y/n)’s hands out in front of her.” Jimin ascquieces, staring apologetically down at me as he tugs my hands towards him.

“This is cute,” I say, “I always love holding Jimin-ie’s hands.”

Thwack. The stinging imprint of Namjoon’s palm on my ass burns deliciously. I arch my back, looking over my shoulder at him with a half-smile. “Do it harder, daddy.”

A breath sucks in between his lips as I utter the word I know will get him feeling as hot as me. “You’re playing a dangerous game, baby girl,” Namjoon grits out, his jaw clenched tightly.

“Oh, daddy,” I say, “Don’t you remember? I’m the fucking Queen.”

“Was that a chess pun? Nice.” A muffled voice followed by a squeaky laugh sounds through the door.

“Seokjin,” Namjoon seethes, flying over to open the door and drag the older boy back inside, “I thought I told you to let me know if you could hear us.”

I tug out of Jimin’s gentle hold, straighten back up, and then situate myself into a sitting position on the table.

I watch amusedly as Jin shimmies his way out of Joon’s grasp, “Yah! It’s not my fault I get intense FOMO. Don’t hate the player, hate the game. Besides, I only heard you because I had my ear pressed to the door.”

Jimin stifles a giggle. I let out a full-on laugh. Namjoon mumbles what sounds like a plea to some higher power under his breath.

“See what I have to deal with?” Namjoon turns to me, shaking his head. “Are you sure you want to sign up for this?”

“That depends,” I swing my legs back and forth as I stay perched on the table, “Are you going to keep spanking me?”

The boy who had just unhesitatingly bent me over to punish me now blushes and rubs the back of his neck. “I mean, probably? You have quite a mouth on you, baby.”

Hopping off the table, I laugh, “Good answer. Ten points to Gryffindor.”

“Woo!” Jin cheers, “Nice job on the House Points, Joon-ie!”

“I am in love with idiots,” Jimin sighs.

Grabbing my phone from my backpack, I let out a slight yell as I read the time. “Shit, shit, shit, shit!” I scramble to shove all of my textbooks back into my bag.

“What is it, noona?” Jimin worries, appearing next to me. “Are you late for class?”

“No,” I cry, “It’s so much worse. I’m late for my weekly Animal Crossing discord chat! Heath is gonna kill me…”

“Heath?” Jin scowls, “Who is this Heath you speak of?”

“Chill, fam,” I shrug my backpack onto my shoulders and stare contemplatively down at the three different coffees. “You can’t get jealous every time I mention a new person. What’s next? You’re gonna come for Tom Nook?”

Namjoon - who must play Animal Crossing - stifles a laugh as Jin pouts. “She has a point, Jin.”

“And so does a pencil. Big whoop,” Jin scowls with his arms folded.

“Aw, Seokjin-ie,” I coo, reaching over to pinch his cheek, “Don’t be mad. You’ll get to spend all day with me on Saturday after volunteering! What are we doing, anyways?” I level Joon with my best side-eye as I ask that question, knowing he is more likely than not the mastermind behind our planned date.

“It’s going to be great, noona!” Jimin pipes up, hugging me from the side, “You’re going to love it…You’re going to love us.” He murmurs the last part, probably not meaning for me to hear; but, I do.

God, I do.

“We’ll pick you up before volunteering,” Joon says, “Just bring yourself and a change of clothes.”

“What?” I decide - fuck it - and attempt to grab all three coffees, “No overnight bag?”

Jin, who had just taken a sip of his own coffee, spews it everywhere. “Pack one,” He gasps out in between coughs.

Laughing, I walk to the door, which Jimin kindly opens for me. “Okay, I’ll think about it. Ah, I’m so late. Jimin and Jin, I’ll punish you at a later time. Joon, you can try to punish me at a later time.” Living for their astonished expressions, I wave as best I can with three coffees in hand, “Bye, babes! Text me-e-e.”

As I make my way out of the library, it hits me that I only have one more day to prepare for this date. Fucking hell…

a/n: this is such a filler of a chap with a tinge of drama mixed in, hehe. the next one is gonna be that date tho uwu stay tuuuuuuned and thanks 4 reading

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mikkomacko · 4 years

Text

In The Shadows 4

The bacon on the stove cackles lowly, spitting out a spark of hot grease and y/n is grateful that she's not standing in front of the pan. She hums, flipping her hash browns as the creak of the front door opening and closing flows through downstairs. The sound of a duffel bag dropping, and light shoes on the floor makes her smile. She moves over to flip the bacon, lowering the flame under the pan.

"They upstairs?"

Y/n turns, rolling her lips into her mouth to keep from smiling too much. Harry's on the other side of the counter, tiny hair clip holding his rouge curls back, and he's dressed like he just came from practice. She nods, stomach fluttering when his dimples sink into his rosy cheeks.

"Sleeping or getting ready?"

It takes her a moment to peel her focus off of him enough to answer. "Jess is in the shower, Jo went for a run, and Tia should still be sleeping."

Harry's smile deepens, and he quickly maneuvers around the counter, crowding her back into the corner and cupping her face. His lips are like a cool shower after a hot day, or coffee early in the morning, or the sun rising after a night of rain.

The bacon pops again, and Harry jumps away from her. "Fuckin'-" he furiously rubs his arm where a red splotch has grown, pouting like a baby at the mark.

Y/n giggles, flipping the meat again. "You okay?" She asks, moving the finished hash browns to a serving plate and working on scrambling eggs.

"I guess so," Harry mutters, leaning his hip against the counter top. He crosses his arms over his chest, glaring at the pan of bacon. "fucking cock blocking bacon."

She giggles again, leaning over to peck his cheek just because she can. After all this time she can finally kiss him. Well, as long as Jess isn't around. But it's worth it, it's so worth it, and judging by the smug grin on Harry's lips, he believes it too.

The sound of that bedroom door opening upstairs pops the bubble around them, sending Harry two steps further from the stove and y/n staring intently at her eggs. Not wanting to seem awkward or different in front of whoever's coming downstairs, y/n strikes up conversation. "How was practice?"

Harry groans, throwing his head back and pouting. Y/n has to try really hard to not smile like a puppy being handed a bone. "Exhausting. Don't have a game this week so we're conditioning."

"I'm assuming it's a lot of running?"

"You've no idea." He huffs, crossing his arms over his chest, "Made me glad I didn't eat breakfast this morning or it would've been-"

"Why are you here so early and why are taking about gross things?"

Her shoulders deflate at the sound of Jess's voice, disappointed that she's not really gonna be able to speak to him much now. Jess always has to be the one talking.

"Didn't even say anything gross!" Harry defends, eyebrows scrunching.

"You would've if I hadn't stopped you!"

Y/n continues cooking, the siblings arguing fading into background noise as she sneaks gazes at Harry. It's odd to look at him now and know he's more than Jess' brother, more than a friend. He's her boyfriend. Her very hot, yet adorable, captain of the soccer team boyfriend. Her stomach flutters. Harry's turned her into a mushy fangirl fonding over her favorite heartthrob. She supposes he's always been her favorite heartthrob though, so she shouldn't be too surprised.

"Stop bitching at me and go suck Tina's dick or something."

The snip in Harry's voice snaps y/n out of her thoughts, eyes widening as Jess gasps. She turns to her best friend, wincing when she sees her angry squint. If this were a cartoon, her head would be red and smoke would pour out of her ears.

"Stop annoying my friend and go tap another keg!"

Harry snorts, rolling his eyes. "Good comeback, m'such a stupid frat lad aren't I?"

Jess slams her hands on the counter, screaming in frustration before taking off out of the room, stomping all the way upstairs. The kitchen is now uncomfortably silent, a disembodied ring filling the air alongside Harry's obvious annoyance. He slumps back against the counter, head falling forward as he huffs to himself.

It's not the first fight she's ever seen between the two siblings, not even close, but it is the first fight in which Harry's hers and Jess only wants her when it's convenient. Like for arguments, or help studying, or someone to make her breakfast. With that thought up front in her mind, she tip toes to Harry, hands behind her back nervously. Usually when him and Jess fight, she's giving him a sympathetic smile and following after the younger of the two.

She gently butts her forehead into his shoulder, muttering, "Hi." She's not sure what else to say.

Harry peeks at her out of the corner of his eye, only pausing for a brief second before his teeth are releasing his bottom lip and he's grinning. "Hey,"

"Do you want toast?"

Chuckling lowly, so manly in his chest yet so cute on his mouth, Harry drops his arms and wiggles her into his chest and caging her in with hands steady on her back. "I'd love some toast."

"Yeah?"

He pecks her nose and her stomach swoops. "Yeah."

"Only if you shower right after breakfast."

Harry's mouth parts in offence, eyebrows pinching together. "Are you saying I'm stinky?"

"Not explicitly." Y/n giggles quietly, fingers tightening on his shirt where they rest on his abdomen.

"She's not gonna let me use her shower peanut." Harry shrugs, as if there's no other way for him to possibly clean himself in a house with four showers and a spout out front. Not that she'd spray him down with a hose, but still.

"You can use mine. S'probably cleaner than hers anyway." Both her and Harry giggle at that. Jess and Harry are known for being quite messy, and y/n is known for being the one following behind to clean up the mess.

"Thank you."

"Of course," she lets her lips ghost over his in a teasing kiss. "now let me finish breakfast before you start fermenting."

"What happened when we all got home? Did you stay at the house?"

The courtyard is empty, everyone most likely back in their rooms getting ready for the football game tonight. Which is convenient for Y/n and Zoe because they haven't seen each other since Saturday and they need a safe, low-key place to talk about what happened with Harry. Zoe told her that her and a couple of the girls saw them kiss, but most of the crowd was clearing out already and probably missed it so they were safe there. As for the team, Harry's already asked them to not say anything, wanting to keep their relationship quiet for now.

"He just walked me home. I didn't even think about staying with him if I'm being honest."

Zoe rolls her eyes at y/n, giggling, "you can stay with him without being hunted down by the church ya know?"

Blushing, y/n wraps her arms around her chest and elbows her friend. "I know that! It just didn't come up, like he didn't invite me and I'm not going to invite myself."

A whistle blows from the direction of the soccer field, hopefully coach calling the end of practice. Usually she's goes home right after class, but Zoe texted her and asked if they wanted to hang out before the game. Apparently part of "hanging out" is waiting for Niall and Harry to get out of practice, not that she minds. She loves hanging out with Zoe, and she loves the warmth that bubbles in her veins when she thinks of Harry now.

"I mean, that'll probably be the spot for you two now, right? It's not like you can be all relationship-y at your house with his sister around." Zoe makes a face at the mention of Jess, greatly disliking the girl after seeing how careless she is with her friends. She's probably heard some stories from Harry as well.

Y/n shrugs. She hasn't thought about it much, too excited by the fact that Harry actually likes her the way she likes him. They both decided to not tell anyone who could potentially let Jess know, wanting to see how they work as a couple before causing a disaster with Jess. It sucks to think that she can't share this part of her life with her best friend. This is her first boyfriend, her first college relationship, and she should be giggling and complaining about him to Jess like normal friends. But Jess has made it very clear how she'd feel about Harry dating any of her friends, let alone y/n. A part of her is flattered that Jess is so selfish over her, but deep down she knows it's not that way. If Jess loved her so much, why is she always dropped for Tina?

"No one at the house would do anything to fuck this up for you, ya know?" Zoe bumps their shoulders together, offering her a reassuring smile. "The boys all love Harry so much, and the fact that you're like the first girl he's ever been interested in is a huge deal. They wouldn't chase you away or spread rumors. You're safe there."

Y/n leans closer to her friend, conveying her gratefulness for Zoe through the simple action. "All the guys there are nice, it's just weird still. Like I've never actually dated someone so to have my first relationship around that many people is kinda scary."

A soft chatter comes from the soccer field, and then a couple players are passing them to head towards the dorms. Y/n notices them wincing as they walk and frowns, knowing Harry's going to be just as sore from conditioning too. "Maybe it's a good thing, ya know? Going out of your comfort zone a bit. Could make your relationship even stronger in the long run."

Silence takes over, Zoe turning towards the field at the sound of more footsteps undoubtedly hoping it's Niall and Harry, while y/n tries not to well up with tears. She's going to have thank Harry for introducing her to a real friend. A friend that doesn't only talk about their problems, or try to control her.

Zoe pulls y/n up from the bench, tugging her towards the incoming group of soccer boys, and she notices Harry and Niall trailing behind them. They pass the group, that's all walking with similar limps, and Zoe launches herself at Niall as if they'd been apart for decades. Niall winces, stumbling on his tired legs but squeezes his girlfriend back.

"Why hello peanut," Harry greets, flushed cheeks sinking into two dimples, "what are you doing out here? Surrounded by all these boys?"

She blushes -for reasons unknown to her-and gently steps into his chest. "Waiting for you to walk me home, of course."

Harry slinks his arms around her, pressing a quick and chaste kiss to her mouth. Her blush deepens. "Yeah? Need your knight in shining armor to keep you safe from the harassment of smelly soccer bastards?"

"You do know that you're the 'smelly soccer bastard' that has been harassing me, right?"

Niall and Zoe both snicker making her grin proudly. Harry's smirk never falters, if anything it widens, and he gently butts his forehead against hers.

"Don't you forget it."

Eleanor sputters out water as Asteria finishes her story of the time Zayn let her pierce his ear, and Zoe and y/n burst into stronger giggles. Eleanor frantically grabs for a paper towel, face going red as she dabs at the drink spilt down her chin.

"Did Harry bring his stupid fr-oh."

Jess pauses in the entryway of the kitchen, lips pursing as she takes in the four girls sat around the island sharing a bag of Doritos. After meeting up with the boys, y/n and Zoe decided to get ready for the football game together at her place, inviting Asteria and Eleanor along too. They've all been invited to the party after, courtesy of their boyfriends-the word still makes y/n squeal-and figured they'd might as well hang out for a bit while the boys get washed up from practice.

"Harry's not here." Y/n says awkwardly, nervous under Jess' observing glare. Luckily, the other three girls aren't intimidated, heads high as they glare back.

"Okay," Jess looks at y/n, hands on her hips. "are you going to the game?"

She nods, noticing that Jess is dressed more for a day of shopping rather than a football game. She's wearing pristine white jeans with heels, a lacy top tucked into her bottoms, and her hair perfectly straight. "A-are you?"

"Yes, but I'm sitting with the girls so you should probably sit with them." Jess waves her hands at the girls behind y/n.

"She was planning on it honey." Asteria scoffs, making Eleanor and Zoe both giggle. Y/n is able to hold in her laugh, but she still smiles. Real friends. They're nice.

"Then I guess I'll see you tonight." Jess huffs, turning on her heel and clacking all the way to the front door. They wait for the sound of it closing to bust into giggles again. Zoe hunches over, clutching her stomach as she laughs and she knocks her knee into the counter. Her high pitched yelp makes them all laugh more, and y/n realizes this is the first time she's ever had one of those laughs with friends where you're really laughing just because they are. They're so distracted by giggles that they don't hear the front door open, nor the sound of four boys moving into the kitchen. Until Eleanor shoves herself off the counter, tripping on Asteria's stool.

"Louis!" She laughs again, falling in a heap at his feet. The girls manage to calm their hysterical laughs, y/n's side aching from the exertion.

"What's got you lot so worked up?" Louis chuckles, helping his girlfriend to her feet. She giggles, no shame present as she shares a kiss with him.

"We're just really fucking funny." Asteria smirks, flipping her black hair off her shoulder. Zayn slinks an arm over her shoulder, their hands linking together by her chest. Y/n hasn't officially met Zayn, but he seems nice for always being the quiet one of the frat house.

"We want to laugh." Harry whines with a pout, draping himself over her back. She's forced to hunch over under his weight, holding them both up with her elbows on the countertop.

"Well you missed it." Zoe teases, poking her tongue out at Harry. Y/n giggles at the wounded noise that leaves him, and he lifts himself off of her.

"Maybe next time you'll be here in time to see us embarrass your bitchy sister again." Asteria giggles, leaning further back into Zayn's chest. He smirks proudly at her, pressing his lips to the side of her head. Y/n thinks it's sweet how a boy as frightening as him can treat his girl so softly.

Harry's hands slip around y/n's stomach, leaning over her shoulder with a furrow between his eyebrows. "Was she giving you a hard time?" His warm breath tickles her ear, making her shy away with a giggle.

"Nothing she hasn't done before."

Harry's frown deepens at that. He knows that Jess has always taken y/n for granted. She could have the prettiest, smartest, funniest, most amazing girl as her best friend. Instead she chooses to make sure y/n is kept in her shell, always around to cater to Jess. He had never wanted to step in between them, hoping y/n would see for herself but after that day she was crying over book group, he couldn't take it.

"Doesn't make it right." Zoe reminds her, reaching past Harry's face to pat her cheek lovingly.

"I know," y/n assures, trying not to smile to widely. "that's why I've made better friends." By the way the other three girls smile, they know she means them. Harry thinks he could melt right then and there, seeing her laugh and smile and be rambunctious. She's turning into the person he always knew she could be, and all it took was one soccer game.

Glad that they're in the safety of their friends, he grips her chin and tilts her head unit he captures her lips in a kiss. He can't believe he survived so long without knowing what it felt like to have his mouth on hers. He swears he'll never forget it.

Y/n is drunk. Really drunk. And so is Harry, judging by the way they're practically carrying each other around the backyard. Harry finally convinced her to play a game of beer pong, and it turns out she's got pretty good aim. They won and decided to celebrate with a shot of tequila each because Harry swears it's his favorite drink.

They somehow get pulled into another game, this time against Zoe and Niall. Music blares from the speakers in the living room, flowing out into the backyard where groups have gathered to dance and drink. The beer pong table is set up in the far corner, hidden in a place y/n thought would be safe from Jess, Tina, and the little minions. She doesn't want to see her friend, doesn't want to be reminded that it feels like her high school years were wasted with such a bland friend. But apparently she's a magnet for the Styles DNA because Jess somehow struts out in the backyard just in time to see y/n and Harry win their second game of beer pong.

The group that has gathered around them cheers and hollers, the loudest being Louis and Eleanor, and Harry immediately tackles y/n into a hug. He lifts her up, the both of them giggling stupidly as he jumps in a group with his friends. Y/n wiggles out of his arms, stumbling into his side just as someone passes Harry a congratulatory drink. The cup gets bumped, it's contents spilling down her and Harry's shirt.

"I'm sorry Harry!" She gasps, pulling the wet fabric off his chest and squeezing the liquid out of it. Harry shivers but giggles, swatting her hand away.

"S'okay Peanut, m'fine." He promises, backing her away from the group with two hands on her waist. The party continues to move around them, y/n feeling dopey at his glossy eyes and flushed cheeks. "You're more messy than me. Gotta get you-"

"Y/n what are you doing?"

Harry's head snaps up at the sound of Jess' voice, y/n whirling around in his hold. Jess and her new friends have all moved to the porch, gathered around the fire pit. She notices they're all dressed similar, and they're sharing a bottle of champagne. Where did they get champagne from at a frat party?

"Hiya Jess!" Y/n giggles, Harry's warm hands tickling her sides now that her brain has actually registered their presence. Jess looks her up and down, eyes narrowing at the spill on her maroon shirt.

"Are you seriously drunk again?"

Harry jumps in before y/n can. "Are you seriously drinking champagne out of flutes? Where the fuck did ya get those?"

Jess shoots Harry an annoyed glare, but ignores his slurred comment. She takes a small step away from Tina, nose scrunching in disgust when she smells the alcohol on y/n. "Beer pong? You're not some raging frat guy y/n."

Y/n huffs, heart still registering her friend's harsh words despite how foggy her brain feels. "Who are you to tell me what I am? You meet Tina and now you're a fucking Popsicle."

Harry snorts from behind her, swaying on his feet and pushing her a step closer to Jess. The younger sibling rolls her eyes, blowing off y/n's insult. "And you're an embarrassment! You're a mess and you're acting stupid! This is why I can never take you anywhere or let you meet anyone worth a damn!"

Y/n stumbles back, feeling as if she's just been slapped. An embarrassment? Is that what Jess thinks she is? Who's the one wearing white jeans to a party? Who's carrying around a flute of champagne when this is clearly a cheap booze kind of place? Who's the one acting like a wannabe rich housewife? If anyone's the embarrassment it's Jess! But y/n can't say that. Because that's still her best friend. The girl she's shared so many years and so many memories with. The girl that kept her company through school and let her borrow her earrings. The girl that's always been like a sister to her.

"Jess that's enough!" Harry snaps, suddenly sounding more sober than he's been since they got back from the game. Jess opens her mouth, ready to sass Harry back but he's pushing y/n up the porch steps and shoving his sister out of the way. "I don't care how entitled you think you are, I won't let you be a bitch to y/n any longer."

Harry's always been good at pissing Jess off, but he's never spoken to her so harshly that she's been stunned into silence. Y/n feels dizzy as Harry leads through the house and up the staircase. An embarrassment? She didn't even do anything? She was just having fun? Why would Jess ever say that?

The second level of the house is a lot quieter than downstairs, the main noise being the muffled party sounds from below. Harry guides her down the hall. Throughout her friendship with Jess, y/n has always been the other. It's always Jess and y/n, not y/n and Jess. And she was fine with that because she had Jess. Yeah she could be a little mean sometimes, always bossing y/n around but it was good. They balanced each other out. But now...now she's just mean. It's like she doesn't even care about y/n.

"Aww peanut," Harry huffs, kicking his bedroom door shut behind him and locking it. After stumbling into his room after his first party to find a couple going at it on his desk, he always locks the door. "please don't cry."

Y/n sniffles, not even realizing she was crying until Harry said it. His words are like a nail in a cracked dam, y/n breaking into sobs and burrowing into his shoulder in embarrassment. Harry tightens his hold on her, not carrying that they're both covered in beer.

"I didn't mean to be embarrassing." She whimpers, crying even more when Harry shushes her. He strokes his fingers through her hair.

"You're not embarrassing peanut." He says firmly. "You're cute and you're funny and I was having so much fun with ya."

"I was having fun too!"

"I know, I know," he assures, pressing a tender kiss against her hairline. He lets her cry herself out, holding her tightly until she's nothing but puffy eyes and hiccups. "Lets get you clean clothes, hm?"

Y/n nods, peeling away from Harry's chest. She moves to sit on the bed but he stops her with two hands on her cheeks, thumbs swiping under her eyes. Her heart thumps loudly with the way he's looking at her, eyes gleaming with something she can't identify. It's like he's staring into her soul, everything she is, and not minding one bit of what he sees. Tears well up in her eyes again, this time for an entirely different reason.

"Even crying you're so beautiful." Harry whispers, lips quirking up when he sees a blush rise on her cheekbones. With a peck between her eyebrows, he nudges her to sit down and starts digging through his dresser.

Headache budding behind her eyes and body suddenly exhausted, y/n peels off her shoes as Harry gathers a shirt and sweatpants for her. "Can go change in there peanut." He coos, nodding towards the attached bathroom. She takes the clothes from him, closing the door. By the time she's changed and washed her face, Harry's changed into a pair of athletic shorts and a new shirt as well.

Her shirt gets tossed in Harry's wicker hamper, her jeans folded and placed on top of the stack of books on his desk. "Wanna stay the night?" Harry mumbles shyly, setting up Disney+ on his laptop. Y/n nods, a smile taking over her face as she knees her way into his unmade bed. Harry doesn't comment as he watches her arrange the pillows and straighten the blankets, but he does smile like a fool.

The intro of Lady and the Tramp starts playing, Harry shutting off his light as he slips into bed next to her. Y/n gladly snuggles into his side, head resting on his ribs as he runs his fingers up and down her spine. Not even five minutes in does she feel her eyes starting to droop, lazily looking around the room. She freezes when she spots a familiar poster hung up on the wall, the glitter on his name glinting in the moonlight coming from the window.

"You hung my poster up." Y/n mumbles sleepily, chest flooding with warmth. Harry doesn't skip a beat.

"Of course I did. My favorite person made it for me."

Now it's her smiling like a fool, finally letting her eyes slip shut. Half way to unconsciousness, she decides that she never wants to speak to Jess again.

#in the shadows #harry styles #fanfic #fanfiction #fluff #one direction #harry styles au #frat boy harry styles #soccer harry #best friend's brother #forbidden love #college harry

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amxwolf · 3 years

Text

Here is why conventional healthful-thinking is not working on Millennials.

Have you ever had that terrifying dream where you are stuck in a dark forest or sketchy alley, frantically running for your life from some kind of feral monster or mad man? Most of us can personally recall at least once being roused from sleep in a cold sweat because their brain had spent the last few hours perfecting the latent image of a made-to-order nightmare. While that experience is certainly not exclusive to Millennials (rather quite the opposite), the waking reaction or at least how it is processed later by this roughly categorized group of mislabeled people is unique to say the least.

For years now, people in marketing have been fervently dissecting and attempting to recreate what has been loosely categorized as "Millennial Humor". And in all of their efforts to connect with this flock of black sheep, the grand majority of them seem to be missing a key factor in the psychology at work here. For all the unwarrantable bilge that modern advertising haphazardly cobbles together, only a small percentage of the nonsense is seasoned perfectly with the secret ingredient. What is this singular spice? Well, while indulgent to profess and speculative, from someone "sitting in millennial class”, it's obvious: A touch of salt.

Never will I sit here and cry to the general public about how unhappy I am that the modern advertising industry is just not scratching my itch for the wares it’s peddling, but I think it's important for us now to look at how this systemic lack of understanding is reaching beyond the world of subliminal profiteering. Society has other significant quality-of-life effecting systems that are also missing the mark when trying to aim and reach out to help this specific group of people. Puns aside, "a touch of salt" as I quipped, is flavoring the lives of a lot of people in their mid to late 20's and early 40's. And the most frustrating and difficult to reconcile attempts that I personally have made to better myself, have been those that were guided by people who just cannot seem to put their brain into that salty head space.

For example, trying to focus on and internalize a well-organized medical presentation about the encompassing negative effects of stress or insomnia and its seemly simple solution of just "changing your thinking", is about as easily digestible as a two-decade-year-old fruitcake for someone who is imprisoned daily by the symptoms of chronic stress. While I may sit there and give listening (ironically) "the old college try", the sound quickly turns to fuzzy white noise the deeper the lecture dives into positive thinking.

You see, Millennials are not generally fluent in positive thinking. More and more of them seem to be speaking a very distinctive dialect of realism, which incorporates a robustly cultivated sense of sarcasm and a somewhat grim shade of hopelessness. A lot of millennials grew up with a laughably poetic twist on "Growing Up" and "Being Successful", which in turn has colored their day-to-day interactions and created this defeatism-culture. Millennials will openly joke about their death as a needed release, their eulogy as a retirement card, or emotionally decompile themselves over something simple like saying "you too" in a situation that doesn't warrant it.

A good percentage of Millennials were old enough to understand the destructive consequences of the most recent housing market disaster on a very personal level; At an impressionable age, watching their own parents, who may have worked excruciatingly hard at the expense of any number of personal or family goals, lose just about everything resonated in a way that cannot be unheard. Then add the borderline criminal and unscrupulous "sheep-shearing" that became common place when the generation was herded off to college, trade school, or other form of career-building education. Not to mention the fact that upon completing said programs, a proverbial "step-in-the-right direction", a substantial number of these "hopeless wanderers" were faced with yet another barbed-wire hurdle when the job market in countless fields were oversaturated with potential employees. Many positions had not been vacated as they normally would have been with the age of retirement being stretched further and further down the road due to increased cost of living and financial demands; the finish line or lap marker was just not getting any closer. To add insult to injury, Millennials, sometimes unbelievably hardworking, are frequently being listed as perpetuators of the clashing reality we have today. This being what the modern media is calling "The Great Resignation"; a dubious combination of a labor shortage amidst an unemployment spike fueled by uncompetitive wages left unchecked, the government's inability to reel in the situation, and a general devaluing of laborers overall.

Oh. And also, we were killing the diamond industry at the same time. Or was it simultaneously the marriage and divorce industry? Wait! I think it was cinema? Or no....maybe it was fabric softener. For a complete dissertation of all the things Millennials brutally murdered over the last two decades, perhaps I'll include a link below if for no other reason to drive my point home.

You have this group of people who are conditioned to endlessly swimming upstream, against the current, with nothing but chastising and bitterness to listen to. So, when it comes to something universal like learning to "sleep better" or "problem solving", the indifferent but somehow time-honored approach of saying "it's as easy as just taking control" is over time if not immediately rejected as dissonant information.

These people don't feel like they have control; some of them feel like they never had any to begin with.

Why is this a problem?

Our society is not developing a taste for "salt" at a pace in which it can prepare social-sustenance for its population. We're not getting any younger, and neither are the generations in front of us.

Millennials are already, by some definitions the mass-population of workers, voters, and other titles that we've yet to embrace. And our lack of interest is not because we do not have a passion for positive change (even on a global scale). Millennials have voiced over time that they feel they are the silent majority amidst a group of people who will not give them breathing room and don't respect the validity of their opinions and ambitions. And it is by no means restricted to one region or country on this planet. This is a global phenomenon.

I could spin a vast yarn about the political ramifications of continuing to exclude the Millennials from the metaphoric Counsel of Elders, but I'm more concerned about the neglect that is spreading elsewhere. We need our leaders in the medical and social fields to really respect and dig deep into how to incorporate "Millennial Thinking" into their treatment and development plans. A large amount of the global population is going to need carefully tailored treatment for things as old as depression, bi-polar tendencies, or schizophrenia as well as newly discovered mental encumbrances like imposter-syndrome.

While “positive-thinking” may have been easily cultivated in the past, we may need to start from a more negative approach and build from there to educate and treat a group of down-on-their-luck millions. Pumping drugs into a populace is not going to permanently patch the leak either, so there truly is precedence for a rehashing of how we should prioritize mental health in modern society.

Stop spending so much time and energy assigning blame to modern technologies and social norms. Are these going away? No? In that case, those things are much like our other daily stresses that are unavoidable. Yes, you can change your nightly routine to de-stress the same way that you can change a job or a daily commute, but there needs to be a fundamental shift in accountability divvied to circumstances out of a person's control rather than scolding them for not being able to manage it.

Do I have all the answers? No.

But this was less about offering a solid a solution and more about opening a dialogue. A starting point.

So yeah. I've had that dream of being chased through the woods by a life-leeching alien. It felt very similar to being sucked dry of my pitiful wages for an education that was at the time, barely panning out. Even now, as a 32-year-old, slightly more successful version of the starving student I've become, I still feel as though my rat race will end when my heart gives out; and all I can hope for is enough money when I drop to cover the ambulance ride to the over-crowded emergency room and a large pit to rot in. But I just hope that the generation behind me has the benefit of a system that understands how to create and sustain “Millennial Inspired” social structures that will allow them to flourish in what little we can leave behind for them.

Also, could you pass the salt?

#rant #millenials #heavy thoughts #random thoughts #seriously though modern mental medicine is a joke

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sanderssidesfanfiction · 3 years

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If There’s a Place I Could Be - Chapter Seven

If There’s a Place I Could Be Tag

August 24th, 2000

Remy gripped one of his arms with the other as he stood at the threshold of his new dorm room in college as his mother whined and wailed and generally put on a display of the overly-attached, they-grow-up-so-fast mother. He stood there with an awkward half-smile on, waiting for her to finish her spiel as she crushed him in a hug, and then made her excuses to leave.

His dad was a lot less emotional, giving him a simple smile and a, “Make us proud, son,” before he was gone.

“Your parents are quite the pair,” his new roommate said from inside the dorm.

“Tell me about it,” Remy grumbled, closing the door. “I’m so glad I get to be away from them for a while.”

November 1st, 2000

Remy woke up with a killer headache as someone opened the blinds. “Ugh, d’you have to do that?!” he griped, not opening his eyes and turning away from the window.

A voice, that decidedly did not sound like his roommate, laughed. “Oh, yeah, the hangover has set in. Do you need some ibuprofen?”

Remy’s eyes shot open, and he turned to face Emile, who was still standing in front of the window. He squinted and grimaced. “Ugh. Please?”

Emile silently passed Remy a pill bottle and some water. Remy grunted his thanks after he swallowed. “Ugh. What happened last night?”

“You got pretty drunk is what happened,” Emile said. “You could barely stand by the end of the night.”

Remy groaned and fell back onto the bed. Honestly, sleeping more sounded pretty good right about now.

“Hey, no, we gotta get breakfast, Rem,” Emile laughed. “I know you only have afternoon classes, but you need to eat.”

“Mmph. Says who?” Remy asked.

“Says the shrink-in-training who knows a balanced diet is a key factor to maintaining good mental health,” Emile responded matter-of-factly. “Come on, up. I doubt you’ll be the only one arriving for breakfast in what you slept in last night.”

Remy got off the bed, swaying ever-so-slightly. “Ugh, hangovers are nasty,” he grumbled.

And, of course, to make things worse, Emile looked immaculate; the only thing that could be considered “out of place” was his hair, and that wasn’t out of place so much, because his curly mop could never be tamed. Remy felt like a mess, probably looked like a mess, and Emile looked ready to go to work wherever he might end up. “I didn’t say anything embarrassing, did I?” Remy asked.

“Embarrassing by your standards, or mine?” Emile asked, letting Remy outside the dorm room.

“Mine,” Remy said, wincing as the sounds of the second floor dorms filled his ears.

“Well, you talked about an old stuffed animal you used to have named Bones,” Emile said with a shrug.

“Oh, I almost forgot about Bones,” Remy said. It wasn’t quite true, but he had almost put the hurt of his mind, at the very least. “Anything else?”

Emile hummed. “Not that I can think of?”

“No talk about crushes or anything?” Remy asked.

Emile laughed. “No, not that I can think of.”

“Okay, good,” Remy sighed. “I had a crazy dream last night where I said I would date you, and I wasn’t sure if I had actually just been drunk.”

“No,” Emile said, shaking his head. He stared forward as they waited for the elevator. “Just a dream, Remy, nothing to worry about. Unless, of course, you believe that means you secretly do have a crush on me.”

Remy laughed. “Oh, as if! You’re so not my type,” he lied. He wasn’t even aware he had a type before today, but clearly, with George in high school and now Emile, he was into the nerds and the geeks. Emile wasn’t full-blown crush, not yet, but he was certainly up there on Remy’s potentials. And when a geek trumped the members of the football team or the swim team, you knew you had a problem.

Emile laughed a little. “Are you sure? Brainiacs are the future!”

“You’re cute, Emile, don’t get me wrong,” Remy said, as the elevator doors opened and the two walked in to find two other people already waiting. “Just not my type. Personality-wise.”

“So what is your type?” Emile asked, grinning. “I might be able to set you up.”

“Ah, no thanks,” Remy said. “Friends are enough for me right now.”

“And later?” Emile asked. “If you decide you want to look for someone?”

Remy blew out a breath. “I’ll go up to whoever I like and say, ‘Hey, I’m going thousands of dollars into debt to get this one paper certificate that won’t guarantee me a job but I was told to get anyway. Want to suffer together?’”

Emile laughed as they left the elevator. “Well, that’s an original pickup line, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “But seriously, what do you plan on doing after this semester?”

“What do you mean?” Remy asked.

“Well, midterms are like...next week, Remy,” Emile pointed out.

“Wait, what.”

“Yeah, they’re next week,” Emile repeated, as ice entered Remy’s bloodstream. “Did you forget?”

“Yeah,” Remy said, voice pitched an octave and a half too high. “Oh man, like, I’ve been saving all my cash from the job to pay for the next semester, but I don’t know if it’s going to be enough. I might have to take out more loans than I thought. Oh man. Oh no.”

Emile put a hand on Remy’s arm. “Hey, deep breaths, Rem. Don’t want to go into another panic attack.”

Remy made a pained noise that roughly translated to too late. He tried to breathe, but his chest felt far too tight. He couldn’t, like, at all.

Emile led him to the cafeteria, by which time Remy’s brain had finally sputtered to life again. “I can’t do this,” he mumbled. “I can’t...I can’t...I can’t do this.”

“Hey, Rem, you’ll do fine,” Emile said. “You said yourself you know everything in your classes!”

“No. No, I mean I can’t do this,” Remy said, waving his hands around the cafeteria. “I can’t do college. Not for three and a half more years. Emile, it’s going to kill me. I’m going to die if I keep trying to go to school. I’m gonna grow bored, or I’m gonna grow even worse mental health-wise than however shaky that is right now. I can’t do that. I can’t stand it here. College...can and will kill me.”

Emile visibly swallowed as they both went over to the waffle maker and Remy went first, pouring the batter into the waffler and closing it tight. “Then you really shouldn’t be going to college, Remy. If it’s hurting you, then definitely do not keep coming here.”

Remy sighed. He knew Emile had a point. He knew that. But still... “My parents—”

“—Under no circumstances will be your excuse to stay in a place that is literally going to kill you,” Emile said sternly. “If this is going to drive you to jump off a building, or hang yourself, or do something stupid so you go out as a martyr, then don’t keep doing it.”

Remy stared at Emile in shock and confusion until the waffler dinged. He grabbed the waffle, grabbed whipped cream, and sprinkles, and started making his signature mess of a breakfast. “This is going to come across as really insensitive,” he warned Emile. “But...you genuinely care. Why?”

Emile poured waffle batter in the waffler silently before sighing. “I’ve lost too many friends to suicide already.”

“Friends? As in, plural?” Remy asked.

“Yes, Remy. Friends as in plural. High school was not a kind place. Nor was middle school, for that matter, but high school was the final straw for both of them,” Emile said. “Almost lost a third, too. Walked in on her popping pills like they were after-dinner mints.”

“I—” Remy didn’t know what to say. “I’m so sorry.”

“At least I caught the final one in time,” Emile said with a bitter smile. “She didn’t speak to me for a long while after that. Emailed me right before I went off to college, thanking me. She had finally found medication that actually worked for her. Didn’t get a chance to see her before I left, but we’ve been talking about seeing each other over winter break.”

“I hope you get that chance,” Remy said.

“Me too,” Emile sighed. “But Remy, please. If college will kill you, drop out of college. Your parents do not take priority over your mental health. What’s keeping you from dropping out, other than your parents opinions?”

“Finding a place to stay,” Remy said.

“I’ll help you find a roommate who can pay rent, I know a few people around campus who are desperate to live nearby but not in the dorms. What else?”

“Money for food, transportation,” Remy said.

“If you’re not paying for college you should have enough money so that you can buy the food to get you through, even if you no longer have a meal plan. We can get you a bike, or figure out the bus routes needed for you to get to Starbucks to work,” Emile said. “And if necessary there’s other options around the city that I know are hiring.”

Remy had never seen someone angrily pour syrup on a waffle before, but watching Emile do just that was an experience. “Emile...why would you do this for me? Like, I get the whole wanting me to drop out so I get to be your friend still and I don’t wind up dead thing, but that doesn’t mean you have to help me figure everything out.”

“I’m your friend, Remy. Of course I’m going to help you,” Emile said. “That’s what friends do. They help each other.”

“But...but this feels like going above and beyond,” Remy said, wincing as someone shouted something unintelligible across the cafeteria. “Like, most friends support their other friends’ decisions, but you’re actually mapping out how I would live if I were to genuinely drop out.”

“Friends can and should help you prepare for the future if you need help, or even just want help. If they’re able to offer help, they should, in my opinion,” Emile said.

They moved further into the cafeteria to eat, and Remy was thankful that Emile chose one of the darker parts of the cafeteria, away from the windows and the sunroof. “What’s going above and beyond, then?” Remy asked.

Emile shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think there is an ‘above and beyond’ with friendships, but if you need a threshold, how about...moving in with you and getting a part-time job so you can afford the rent and food?”

“That’s definitely above and beyond,” Remy said.

Emile turned thoughtful, poking at his food. “Is it, though, actually?”

“What do you mean?” Remy asked, frowning and taking a bite of waffle.

“I mean, that’s something I could definitely do. It sounds like a good idea, actually,” Emile said.

Remy choked on his waffle piece, before coughing violently and swallowing the rock that had returned to his mouth. “You serious? I thought...I thought you would want to like...see your friends over the holidays, and your folks. You seem like you’d be close to your folks.”

“Well, I can still see them over the holidays,” Emile reasoned. “But this just means I wouldn’t be moving back home over the summer and then moving again when it comes to sophomore year. I can visit my parents without having to live in their house. We could get a two-bedroom apartment, split the rent and food over the summer, and I could handle the rent during the school year while you worry about food. It could work.”

“Emile,” Remy said. “You’re literally saying you would move in with me. For no other reason than I can’t afford my own place on part-time minimum wage.”

“That’s not the only reason,” Emile said. “It would help me save on room and board, too. Less student loans for me.”

Remy laughed incredulously. “So, is this it? Is this a thing that we’re doing? You’re going to move in with me? I thought it’d be one of your friends.”

“Well, most of my friends would go home in the summer, when you need the most help,” Emile reasoned. “And besides, do you honestly think you could get along with any of my friends long enough to actually share living space with them? I know that your own roommate bugs you a whole lot, because you spend so much time in my room, where you don’t have to deal with anyone but me. And if we can stand each other most days when we don’t have classes and you don’t have to go to bed, yet, I think we can handle living in a place at a point in time where you’re going to work and I’m going to school and going to work. I’ll have to talk to my parents about it, of course, but they aren’t going to say no. They just need to know why my tuition is less than it used to be.”

“So...that’s a yes?” Remy asked.

“Yes,” Emile said with a grin. “You drop out of college, and we move in together.”

Remy whistled under his breath. “Okay, then,” he breathed.

#if there's a place i could be #sanders sides fanfiction #remile #emile picani #ts sleep

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sidereal-fantasies · 4 years

Text

Sincerely, Not You

[Choi San]

02: The Genius Writer’s Mind

WARNING(S): None

College AU in which Choi San and many others receive letters that threaten to break their already fragile hearts

“A new opinion can certainly turn the world upside down.”

Everything felt like a mistake with each passing second.

You had only taken this writing class to get one of your credit requirements out of the way, yet the thought of having to produce something not out of logic and real-world evidence has also caused a tremendous amount of stress to fall on your shoulders. You glanced back at your laptop that sat on the makeshift kitchen table, keyboard most likely still burning from the rapidfire typing you produced from earlier in the ungodly hours of the morning.

With the sound of keys dropping on the counter, you peered up to see Yoona, your roommate, walk in with multiple envelopes in one hand and what seemed like another cup of oddly sweet coffee in the other. Knowing Yoona for quite some time now, you were surprised that her signature drink didn’t change as much as her hair color (which was currently blonde due to not knowing which color she should tackle next). You couldn’t tease her about it, though, knowing that your extremely bitter choice of straight black coffee with the tiniest bit of sugar never settled well with most.

“[Name], I picked up your mail for you,” Yoona’s voice echoed as she entered the room. You murmured a quick thanks as you gently placed your now empty mug on the tiny side table before picking up said mail. Other than the usual letter from your parents, a small envelope with only your name written clearly on the front accompanied it as well. The corners of your mouth turned down slightly as you turned the envelope every which way in hopes to find some kind of hint as to who it was from. Weird, you thought. “No return address...”

“Oh? A secret admirer? Seems a little old-fashioned, but look at you,” Yoona teased which only caused you to roll your eyes in response. “Didn’t you say you were going to have a date with some guy from the music department?”

“Didn’t you say you wanted to finish up some of your classwork at the campus cafe?” Yoona called out. The blonde nearly dropped her morning beverage at the sight of you jumping to your feet suddenly.

“Thanks for reminding me, Yoona! I should get going before I lose the chance to snag a seat!” You exclaimed as you began gathering all your essentials.

Your roommate remained by the small counter as she watched you scurry about the room, quickly tossing your things in a bag without a second thought before seeing you bolt out the door without another word spoken.

“Oh, [Name]...”

“You met [Name] last night?”

San hummed in response with a slight nod of his head. “Is there a problem?” he inquired as he stopped typing.

Yeosang shook his head before he rested a hand on the back of his neck. Of course he had no issue with it, seeing that he wasn’t exactly close with you after all. But, it didn’t ease the sudden bemusement that washed over his thoughts. He never exactly received a friendly impression of you, but perhaps he was too quick to judge a book by its cover. Then again, Yeosang had to remind himself that he was speaking with San who always viewed the world through a rather unique perspective.

“I’m just surprised, that’s all. [Name]’s always so curt with a lot of people, but here you are saying they’re much nicer than what everyone says.”

“You’re the same, hyung. When Wooyoung told me you’ve been his friend for several years, I couldn’t wrap my head around how someone as quiet as you are could be dragged into so many of Wooyoung’s schemes,” San responded.

Yeosang hummed softly. “Five years and still going,” the quiet man mumbled as he peered out the window.

Yeosang let San’s remark slide this time, acknowledging his point instead of shooting back one of his infamous retorts. He’s a writer after all, or soon-to-be one, at least. It was in his nature to dissect and characterize people in an oddly poetic manner that defined them in more ways than one. Anyone who caught San’s interest was automatically caught in his neverending story of life. To San, everyone was a character in life that was waiting to be unraveled by the genius writer himself.

“So, that’s it?”

San tore his gaze away from his computer screen as he arched an eyebrow at Yeosang. The elder sighed softly and pinched the bridge of his nose in irritation. Before he could utter another word, three booming voices came through, interrupting the serene morning. By the small corridor entered a teary-eyed Wooyoung who was accompanied by a beaming Song Mingi and Jeong Yunho.

Song Mingi was a force to be reckoned with at times. As co-captain of the university’s dance team and San’s dual-natured roommate, Mingi was a blazing fire, burning the image of a passionate and intimidating man into most strangers' minds, but also warming the hearts of his friends with his oddly cute side of his personality. Infuriating at some points since he likes to disagree with the group for fun? Quite so. Yet, it still caught San off guard at times to see the man he hears everyone is hesitant to approach fond over the simplest cat video he just so happened to scroll past on his social media feed.

Jeong Yunho was very much different from the scarlet redhead despite being just as tall as him. He carried a calming aura around him, always attracting anyone and everyone and befriending with such ease due to his already gentle nature. An open-minded individual who wears his heart on his sleeve and charms everyone with his dazzling smile. A potentially hopeless romantic doomed to suffer if he isn’t careful with his glass heart in the eyes of the Genius Writer.

“San! You’re planning on hanging out with the rest of us this saturday, right?” Mingi’s voice boomed, earning a short chuckle out of the shorter male.

“Saturday’s the only day Hongjoong is ever not working,” San responded as he closed his laptop. The raven haired male casually slid the device back into his bag before he stood up and began making his way towards the door.

“Seems like San’s in a rush to leave already. Did he tell you what he was doing today, Yeosang?” Wooyoung inquired.

Yeosang shrugged his shoulders as he slumped back into the chair. “There’s a new café around the corner, so that’s one option. Or maybe he’s going to meet up with [Name].”

The trio all raised their eyebrows as they gawked at Yeosang for a moment, causing the light brunette to shift slightly in his seat as he turned his gaze away from the three. The feelings are mutual, he guessed. A miracle, perhaps, to all four of them as they contemplated over how the Genius Writer was able to befriend [Name], a fellow college student who always appeared to be much more devoted to education than socializing.

“Is there something wrong, Mingi?” Wooyoung questioned the redhead as he frowned slightly in the direction that San had walked off to.

“[Name] sounds very familiar for some reason…”

The café, as Yeosang had pointed out earlier, was not a far walk from San’s dorm. It was fairly new to the area, having only opened just a month ago, yet it was already gaining some popularity amongst the college student population. Another source of short-lived energy from drinks that most likely only contained a touch of coffee that barely broke through the uniquely flavored beverage that it was mixed in, if you will. Nevertheless, it was a café that many claimed as a spot for comfort and relaxation. The interior was brightly light by the few artificial lights that hung above café-goers as well as by the natural light that flooded through the windows that surrounded them completely, giving the area a fresh feeling of endlessness. There was comfort in the thought that the day’s weather was what encompassed the mood of the tiny café.

San slipped into the café to escape from the bustling crowd of students moving towards their first class of the day. Despite it being a little early in some ways, the café was moving just as much as San’s fellow peers outside. Popular in convenience, he supposed as he approached the counter.

The workers behind the counter did not take long and passed San’s order of a small latte. As San turned on his heel, he spotted you at one of the tables, eyebrows furrowed and a near permanent frown upon your lips, rapidly typing away with no hint of interest in your surroundings. He shook his head gently before deciding that it may be a good choice to distract you from your work for a few minutes.

“Funny seeing you here, friend” San spoke up as he slid into the seat across from you, earning a small smile in response. Judging your slightly tinted cheeks, San assumed you must have gotten here just a little earlier than him.

“I needed to replenish my caffeine levels,” you answered sharply. “As I have found out, I still can’t type up a decent essay to save my life.” San chuckled before tapping the top of your laptop. You peered up at San with a faint frown gracing your lips, as if pleading the genius writer to bless you with the ability to forge an essay that would satisfy not only yourself, but your professor as well. “You probably don’t take the time to look at your surroundings,” San noted.

You tilted your head to the side slightly before motioning San to explain his statement. Heat brushed the dark haired male’s cheeks as he rested a hand on the back of his now burning neck. A sudden tightness in San’s throat accompanied the odd sensation he was experiencing which caused him to clear his throat before he averted his gaze away from you.

“Sometimes, when you are struggling to write, it’s because you’re set on staying within a tiny box. If you stay in that box, you miss a few details about the world around you,” San explained. He stole a quick glance at your features before he waved a hand in front of himself. “Tell me, when you look around the cafe, what do you see?”

Slowly, you let your eyes travel towards the peaceful scene of the cafe before you. It had calmed down since you first stepped in to save yourself from the bitter cold. More tables were empty, you noted, as the handful of workers slowed down and began taking their time in perfecting the orders that were coming in now. You then observed the other students as they furiously scribbled or typed away to finish an assignment that they have also procrastinated on for too long. Others chattered away with each other, basking in the glory of having their lives together. Funny, you thought. Stress plagued most students minds here, leaving nothing but an ominous feeling at the back of the mind. An impending doom from the possibility of not finishing an assignment you had all the time in the world to work on if you only had the motivation to start early. Despite that, it was evident to both San and you that you had missed a major point that San was trying to make.

“Students and baristas are working. More tables are empty- San, what are you trying to get out of this?” You grumbled out of frustration.

San gently shook his head in slight disappointment after he stole another quick glance from you. “Like all other computer science majors, you view everything so objectively at times.”

You weren’t exactly amused with this answer until you caught a certain gleam in San’s eyes. The slight curl of the lips and the knowing gaze revealed an entire story to San. To San, the cafe’s atmosphere was placid, the natural light filtering in as if helping to chase away the anxious dark clouds that followed students too closely at times. The aroma of coffee, faintly bitter or sickenly sweet, traveled and filled every space in between, leaving only a pleasant sensation for all. Tired students remained scattered, eyes glued to the screens of laptops that most likely were burning just as much as an impatient mouth who needed to refuel on caffeine. Friends gossiped and giggled long after their mostly sugar and barely coffee drinks have gone cold. Busy, but not bustling. Scattered, but not nearly vacant. A perfect place to unleash creativity, as San would have commented.

“You need to make up a story sometimes just to achieve what you want in writing,” San stated.

“That’s easy for you to say, Genius Writer,” you countered with a huff.

San quirked an eyebrow at your response before he let out a breathy chuckle. “Maybe so, but you somehow recognized me last night.”

“And what’s that supposed to prove?” you inquired. A soft hum left San as he placed his cup of coffee near his lips, blowing gently on it before savoring a small sip. He placed the cup down and gave a simple shrug of the shoulders. It took you a moment as you caught on to the fact that the slight simper San wore never disappeared in the first place.

“I’m not interested, if that’s what you’re implying,” you stated flatly.

San blinked a few times, his confidence faltering slightly as if he was struggling to process the words that effortlessly slipped out of your mouth. It didn’t help his case either as he caught your gaze boring into your laptop screen again, completely ignoring San’s moment of embarrassment.

“I was gonna say you pick up on tiny details when something interests you, but thanks for friend-zoning me?”

No response was uttered from your already slouching form, too focused on this frustrating assignment that has yet to meet your expectations of satisfaction. It didn’t sit well with you, of course. With how San sees and conveys everything as if it was a new story unfolding in front of his eyes; it was unnerving, for it seemed as if everyone was transparent as glass. But it also intrigued you. For you, who is so used to seeing the world as an endless code that continuously needs tweaks to function properly, seeing such vivid details and hearing new perspectives never crossed your mind. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why you seeked out San. Maybe, just maybe, your world would gradually expand its horizon and welcome in new experiences that you’d never expected to live in.

The time flashed in the right corner of the screen, signaling you to close your laptop with a soft sigh of defeat. “Well, I have to get to my class now. Have a fun time doing whatever future writers do,” you suddenly announced as you stood up. You quickly gathered your belongings, shoving most into your bag without a second thought before grabbing your laptop and scurrying away with only a nod of the head. Unbeknownst to you, your unopened letter had fallen out of the side pocket of your bag along with your earbuds. Having noticed this, San immediately picked up the forgotten items, but was just a second too late as he already saw you at the door.

“[N-Name]!!”

With the chime of the bell, San slumped back into his chair as he wrapped your earbuds into a neat bundle before placing them in one of the pockets of his jacket. He then turned his attention towards the envelope before humming in amusement as the corners of lips curved upwards at the sight of the familiar penmanship that decorated the front of the envelope. Quietly shaking his head, he retrieved his own letter out of his bag before setting the two down on the table in front of him.

It seemed that you got a letter as well, [Name].

#atzwriters #ateez #ateez san #choi san #atzinc #ateez au #ateez imagines #ateez scenarios #ateez fanfic #ateez blurbs #choi san fanfic #kpop #kpop au #kpop imagines #kpop scenarios #kpop blurbs #kpop fanfic #Sincerely Not You #san

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lunias-takes-on-homestuck · 4 years

Text

My Classpects Through the Years

I started getting into Homestuck in late 2012, about a year after [S] Cascade dropped, and like most of y’all I got pretty interested in the system of Classes and Aspects.

...Okay, I got obsessed with it. Who wouldn’t? A highly-flexible system of essentially taking an aspect of reality and interpreting it through the lens of a key verb or idea, creating unique and self-determined power sets limited only by your own imagination? That’s wild. And when I say I got into it, I mean I really got into it. I dove deep into Homestuck’s lore, reading up on popular and somewhat fringe theories about what each Aspect related to, how the Classes utilized them, what the potential Active/Passive pairings were, and how certain Aspects seemed to oppose each other. I even went so far as to contribute to a theory regarding the future of Tavros Nitram, which... didn’t exactly pan out as expected... but it was a ton of fun! And of course, while I was certainly interested in what this all meant for our cast of characters, I was also interested in how it could be interpreted and/or applied to real people.

People are, of course, far more complicated than a simple personality test could possibly explain, but I still got a lot of entertainment out of trying to pin down the classpects of characters or people I knew irl. Which naturally included me. Looking back on it, I think it’s very interesting to see the progression in ideas that led up to my more recent musings, so I figured it would be cool to dive into that and share my past and current classpects here!

Credits:

All images are pulled from the Homestuck Classpect Chart Updated posted by JosiahR94 on DeviantArt.

Artists: Zynchilada (compiled, partially drawn) and Owyn (updated at original resolution). Both blogs listed on the artwork have since been deactivated.

2012-2013 - Knight of Breath

This one is the byproduct of some test manipulation on my part - the fan test I was using was based on MBTI and Jungian archetypes, and honestly I’ve never found them to remain accurate for longer than a couple months at a time. I’ve wound my way around four different MBTI results over the years so I’m not inclined to use them as the basis for much, especially since the original test included fan-created classes and aspects that I really didn’t understand or jive with. But even once I narrowed it down to strictly canonical classes and aspects, I still wound up going with the 3rd-most accurate one. At the time I saw the Knight as the Active Exploiter class, the type to jump into action and wield their aspect as a weapon. I really related the idea of a detached loner who was fiercely protective of their friends, and John had shown off very, very recently (for me, anyway) just how powerful wind could be. The powers were sick, the outfit was neat, and it was absolutely wrong in nearly every way. Nearly. But we’ll get to that.

2013-2015 - Seer of Doom

You’re probably a little familiar with this one if you’ve been keeping up with Homestuck theorists lately, as there are two prolific content creators I know of who identify as Seers of Doom. For some time, I did too! The change was largely brought about because I thought my initial Knight of Breath result hadn’t been accurate enough, and also because I wanted to try my hand at classpecting myself without the aid of tests. At the time I was really feeling the Doom aspect and I saw myself as a guide (or maybe a teacher?) so it felt like it fit. There was just one sliiiight problem - I was entirely focused on how the Doom aspect related to the problems I was having in my life, rather than how I viewed the world around me and interacted with it. I still felt like I was sort of onto something with Doom, but it took some major life events to give me the nudge I needed to see things a little more clearly...

2015-2020 - Sylph of Life

For me, 2015 felt like the year I was finally coming out of my funk and figuring my shit out. It’s the year I started taking college courses (well, a college course), getting into meetups, making new friends, and reinventing myself. At some point I decided that the issue with my initial Doom analysis was that I was overly focused on the challenges I had instead of how I actually dealt with them, and my new aggressively-optimistic outlook would simply not mesh with Doom. Not one bit. I also felt that my class didn’t quite fit, and Sylph was sitting right there with their magick-y healing and creation powerset -- the ultimate support, and the type of person who makes their own way through life by simply refusing to accept they could be stopped or put down by anything. By the time the Extended Zodiac Quiz came out in 2017 and confirmed I was Lifebound, I had already proven to be on top of my game in college in a creative field. I joined our LGBT+ club and started somewhat aggressively railing against overly-restrictive labels and social constructs in Contemporary English to the point that I was exceeding the page limit on our essay assignments on a regular basis and still felt I wasn’t saying everything I wanted to say. Sylph of Life just clicked for me in a way the Knight of Breath and Seer of Doom never had, so I figured I’d nailed it.

Then, earlier this year, I found out I was actually a girl.

2020-Present - Knight of Life... or maybe Heart???

Imagine for a minute that you’re at a theater watching some movie through the perspective of the protagonist. You think you’ve got the plot all figured out, you’re guessing every story beat, and then in the last 5 minutes the big twist reveals the protagonist has unwittingly been an unreliable narrator for the last two hours. Literally everything you thought you understood has been flipped on its head, and it’s still good but it’s all very confusing. You leave the theater wondering what you just watched, and as you turn on your car you suddenly realize there were subtle hints foreshadowing the twist for over half the film. With every passing second the pieces start coming together, and you just know that watching it again would leave you going “How the hell did I miss that?!”

That’s about the best way I can explain what I’ve been experiencing for the past four-ish months. All the puzzle pieces I had put together were thrown totally out of whack and I’m finding every day that there are aspects of myself and my personality that I never knew where there. Discovering myself is hard work, but it’s a wonderful feeling, and it’s no wonder that on the heels of this I’m seriously vibing with the aspect relating to Personal Identity. That said, I still find myself parsing labels and identity through the lens of Life - words which are too restrictive to properly convey who I am, and an experience that can’t be explained or constrained by the stereotypical narrative people tend to have about people who are bisexual, polyamorous, transgender, and at once more complicated than those words can really describe. When I take the Extended Zodiac Quiz I find that I’m still Lifebound, but changing even a single question by a single step leaves me Heartbound instead, and I think that dichotomy really mirrors where I feel I’m at as a person.

Class-wise, I feel drawn to both Sylph and Knight to a degree, but in the years since I first chose the Knight of Breath classpect I have come to understand the class as a Passive Server - one who gives for the benefit of others - and that speaks to me. The wonderful Mythological Class Quiz by @homestuckexamination has only confirmed my suspicions about that. I have yet to decide between Knight of Life and Knight of Heart, but they’re both very interesting classpects imo, and either way I’m sure I’ll be spending far too much of my free time developing powers and things for them :P

Takeaway

Whew, that’s a lot of words! But what exactly does it all mean? Well... if you ask me, Classpecting is sort of a process. I’m sure that, years down the line, I’ll probably say I had it all wrong and I’m actually some other combination of class and aspect, and I’ll reminisce about the days when I was so obviously misreading myself. But that’s kind of the fun of it, isn’t it? It’s just another form of personality quiz, albeit one where you get sick powers and a nifty set of pajamas at the end. And for all the good that introspection can do to help you understand yourself a little better, you better believe I’m going to be spending the next hour or two debating whether passing out heals and buffs while tanking everything would be more cool than body-surfing and turning enemies into clones à la Agent Smith in The Matrix: Reloaded.

#Homestuck #Classpecting #Knight of Breath #Seer of Doom #Sylph of Life #Knight of Life #Knight of Heart #Lunias Takes #Lunias Personal

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traitorsinsalem · 4 years

Note

can you explain the gap year post i dont understand the wording thnk you

higher ed, at least in the u.s., is competitive and also costs a lot of money. if kids who got into schools already take a gap year this year (estimated 30+% from what i've read but will definitely be higher) due to the covid-19 distancing, the graduating class of 2021 will have much greater difficulty getting into schools, even those which may otherwise be easy to get into. staying back a year when you've already gotten into a school and are guaranteed or highly likely (depending on the school) to attend lowers the number of students who'll get accepted to potentially attend the year you've dropped into.

also note that i don't give a shit about the ones who want to be lawyers or whatever i care about people going into fields which really are their only option with the materials and/or abilities they have. 🎷🐛

i have a bigger problem with the u.s. school system than anything else and am only dealing with it because my dad has a job here, we can afford for me to attend college/uni here (if i do go to school in the u.s., which i may not), and i have other advantages allowing me to get into some spiffy school if i bothered to, but unless somebody in the u.s. high school graduating class of 2020 NEEDS to take a gap year this coming year or was already planning on taking a gap year prior to the covid-19 quarantine, i will not hesitate to point and laugh.

even if i don't plan on applying to most of the schools where this is going on and don't care too much about the ripoff that is higher ed in the u.s., i'm not not a fan of the general idea of making a move to slightly benefit yourself at the expense of highly inconveniencing others. so to me this whole thing serves more as a key about what people put first rather than "ougugg less school spots!11!1!"

#long post #this is probably even more confusing but yea #ok time for bee movie musical.

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snuggietuan · 6 years

Text

BAMBAM GIRLFRIEND SERIES // HOW YOU MEET

Word Count: 1817

Your life was actually so boring. Going through the same routine as always. Wake up, go to school, go to work, sleep. You were getting tired of your boring ass life and you needed something new. Your parents pressured you into going to this specific college and you were so broke. You were barely getting by after paying for rent and taking care of yourself. It was hard to find time for yourself since you were so caught up in school and working for money.

Your alarm went off, stealing you away from the dream world you were in. You had always dreamed to get a stable job, a nice boyfriend, and maybe get married and having kids. But life was looking the complete opposite of that. You found your phone buried under your pillow and hurry and tapped snooze. It wouldn’t hurt to sleep in for at least another 10 minutes right?

10 minutes later, the annoying ringtone went off again and you set yourself up in bed, wiping your eyes and turning the alarm off. You headed to the bathroom and did the normal routine. Brushed them pearly whites, and got in the shower. This was your only time to mentally prepare yourself for the day.

You wrapped a towel around your body and rushed back to your room to get dressed. You just threw on some leggings and a sweater since the weather was starting to cool down a bit. You rarely ever did your makeup in the morning since you could come home and make yourself look presentable for work.

You grabbed your bags and books and headed out the door, walking to the campus that was near your apartment. It was rainy today which meant you had to carry an umbrella and avoid puddles. This was one of the disadvantages of your roommate having earlier classes than you. She took the car and left you to walk.

You arrived at your class, your socks almost completely soaked from accidentally stepping in puddles. Your day was already starting out terrible. You paid close attention to your professor's lectures but you somehow always drifted off into a daydream.

You got your phone out from your bag and texted your roommate, you know, the one with the car?

You: Hey. I hate to be a bother but it’s raining and my feet are already soaked. Would it be too much to ask for a ride home?

You drew your attention back to the monitor your professor was teaching on. A few minutes later your phone vibrated

Cassidy: Sure it’s no problem. I would drive you to work but I have a date to catch. I’ll leave you a bus card.

You hated riding the bus, but it was better than no ride at all.

You: Sounds good. I’ll see you then!

You tucked your phone into your pocket and looked at the time on your laptop. You had barely 10 minutes left and you had to make it through it.

You put your laptop in the case and grabbed all your things and made your way to the entrance. You stood under a shelter for 5 minutes until you saw Cassidy’s car pull up. You hurried to open the door since it was pouring down.

She dropped you off at the apartment and you sprinted to your room to get ready for work. You worked at quite an expensive jewelry store so the employers did not have any time for trashy looking employees. You dried your hair and straightened it and put on some heavy makeup. You threw on some jewelry that your mother let you have from her collection and put on a form-fitting dress.

You snatched the bus card that Cassidy left you from the kitchen table and grabbed your purse and umbrella. You made your way to the bus stop that was near your place in 4-inch heels, and it was an understatement that your feet were already starting to hurt. They were not ready for this 4-hour shift you were about to work.

All was going well at work. You assisted a lovely couple looking for wedding bands. They looked absolutely cute and how you dreamed of having a man be so good to you. But then there was also your co-worker who could not go an entire shift without flirting with you. He probably thought you would never catch on to him, but you saw right through him. And your legs felt like they could give out at any moment.

The doorbell on the entrance rang and you whipped your head around to get a view of the customer. You were destined to assist the guy and beat your co-worker to it. You tried to keep a good posture with your aching feet as you made your way to the man.

“Good evening sir, are you interested in any engagement rings? We have a sale goi-” You began to start the staged introduction until the man cut you off.

“Actually I’m just looking for watches, you know, for myself.” He smiled awkwardly.

God damn it Y/N. Always fucking assuming that every guy that walks into the damn jewelry store is looking for a ring.

“My apologies. Here, I’ll show you our finest watches.”

He smiled and you led him to the other side of the store to show him what he was looking for. You showed him the silver watches and some that were on sale. There was absolutely nothing wrong with treating yourself. Damn you should probably take notes.

“What do you think would look good?” He asked you, pointing to one of the more expensive watches, and then pointing at a silver watch on sale.

You smiled and grabbed for the key attached to your wrist to unlock the glass display. “Why don’t we find out?”

You grabbed for the watches he pointed out to you and he tried them on and you could tell he was very pleased. He put one on his right wrist and one on his left to really tell the difference.

“Which one do you think looks better?” He asked you as he flexed his left arm, and then the right.

You put your index finger up to your lips and thought about it.

“Well, I think the expensive one makes you glow a ton. But if you’re on a budget then I would suggest you buy that one.”

“Would you buy this one for your boyfriend?” He questioned you on the spot. It made you a bit flustered, but it would be pretty rude of you to ignore a customer.

“Definitely, if I had one.” You smiled awkwardly at him, but it was just the truth.

“I’ll get this one then” Damn it must be nice to have money in your wallet to treat yourself.

“Excellent! Will that be all you’re looking for today” You asked him as you put the watches back into the display and locked it up.

“Yup that’s all”

“Okay well meet me at the first register and I’ll be back with your watch” You smiled brightly. You ran to the back of the store to fish for the watch he picked out. You came back and helped him pay for everything.

“I think I’ll just look a while longer, thank you though!” He smiled and carried his shopping bag around the store, admiring all the pieces. You heard the doorbell again and your co-worker was making his way out, pulling out a cigarette box. You sighed and followed him outside where he was leaned up against the building, lighting his cigar.

“Do you mind sharing?” You asked him. It had been a while since you smoked, but it wasn’t like you were gonna get addicted or anything, you just needed a chill pill.

He smirked and pulled out a stick for you, you stuck it in your mouth and lit the end for you. You inhaled and immediately started coughing.

“This is exactly why I don’t smoke” You sneered.

“Lame”

“Don’t be an ass” You punched his shoulder and continued smoking the cigar.

“So Y/N, you still single?” He questioned you.

“Don’t you ask me this every shift we have together?” You rolled your eyes at him.

“Cmon Y/N, why won’t you go out with me? Just one date!”

“That’s not how you get a date, Daniel, you have to be way nicer than that”

“Fine. Will you go out on a date with me please?” He asked again, softening his voice as he popped the question.

“No.”

Suddenly he was all up in your face. You could practically smell the pack of cigars he smoked throughout the day.

“Why are you being so stubborn? I have the looks, the potential to be your boyfriend, you just don’t wanna commit to a rel-”

“Hey, why don’t you get out of her face?” A man yelled from the distance, cutting Daniel off. You turned your head to the side to see the man you assisted earlier. That’s when he backed away and walked over to the guy.

“I was actually just returning to my duty.” He inhaled his cigar and blew it right into the man's face, but he did not move a muscle. Daniel took his cigarette out of his mouth and threw it on the ground, smashing it with his shoe, and walking back into the store.

The man walked to you and his expression told you that he was sincerely worried for you.

“Are you okay? That guy seemed like a dick.” He comforted you.

“I’ll be fine” You brushed your fingers through your hair and pulled the end of your dress down, throwing your nasty cigar onto the ground and stomping on it.

“I apologize. You didn’t need to see that.”

“It’s not your fault, who knows what he would have done if I hadn’t come out.”

You seriously didn’t know what else to say. You knew Daniel was a cocky bastard that would constantly flirt with you on shifts, no matter how many times you rejected him, but you never expected him to get up in your bubble.

“I should probably head back to my job. I hope you enjoy your watch.” You started making your way to the front door until the boy stopped you.

He took a random piece of paper out of his wallet and started writing something down.

“Here take this. You can text me when you get home if you want. It’ll make me feel better if I know you made it home.” He smiled softly and perhaps your heart skipped a beat. A man, actually sincerely showing concern for you. Fuck.

You hesitantly took the paper and nodded.

“What’s your name?” You asked him, needing to know the name of the man that basically saved your ass.

“Kunpimook. But really though, call me BamBam”

158 notes · View notes

imaginethemkmusic · 5 years

Text

Comet [Lee Jihoon College AU]

Summary: Second chances were as rare as seeing Halley’s Comet twice in your life. Jihoon guessed he was just a lucky person.

Pairing: Female!ReaderxWoozi

Genre: Fluff, Angst (not really tbh lol I tried)

Admin: Panda

Word Count:

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

"I don't like those wild parties you go to," Jihoon commented towards Sungcheol, who was coaxing the male to get out of the dorm.

Sungcheol scoffed, "But you never go anywhere, how isolated are you trying to be?"

"I'm not isolated, I have a social life," Jihoon shot back, "I just don't like getting wasted with a bunch of other wasted people and making out with strangers."

"And yet you're still friends with Jun," Sungcheol shook his head, amusement twinkling in his eyes.

Finishing tuning his guitar, Jihoon let out a saracastic laugh, "I don't know how or why myself. Go get wasted, I'm going to finish this piece for the group project."

“You have 2 weeks,” Sungcheol insisted, knowing he was fighting a losing battle.

Jihoon shrugged, pretending not to hear the male and plugging in his earbuds. He already had two instrumental tracks, 1 old and 1 new. It was just a matter of choosing which song and finding the lyrics.

“The first one sounds happier by the way,” Suncheol told Jihoon, “I think you should choose the one that reflects your emotions.”

After saying so, he left Jihoon in his thoughts. What he was feeling? Jihoon continued to listen closely to the music, still unsure.

He knew that since he was working with his friends, the happier tune would be better. But for a reason unknown, he couldn’t help but being drawn to the wistful harmony as he closed his eyes in frustration.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Jihoon couldn’t believe his eyes the next day in class as a female youth introduced herself to the class.

“Hello! My name is Y/N L/N from the composition class from SM Universty. I’ll be helping and replacing the old composer for Universal Cowards as well as helping with writing the lyrics. Heechul cashed in a favor from me,” Y/n smiled, “Although we’re not in the same school, as a composer I’m looking forward to hearing all the finished songs.”

The professor nodded and motioned for Y/N to sit with Heechul, Kyunghoon, and the rest of their crew who were going to star in the M/V, “That’s right, Y/N was willing to help this group after the composer dropped out of college.”

Everyone nodded, not surprised. Pledis University was willing to do anything for a better reputation.

Feeling a stare, Y/N turned her head, only for her eyes to slightly widen when she noticed who was staring at her. She tried her best to brush her initial shock off and continue as normal as she could.

“Hyung,” Vernon shook Jihoon’s shoulders, “have you chosen a track?”

Wonwoo nodded, not looking up from his book, “Yea, we should start recording soon.”

“Yea,” Jihoon said, licking his lips, “I just choose which one I should use.”

As he let the rest of his group listen to the song to get a feel, he couldn’t help but be drawn to stare at Y/N again.

How long had it been? Years at best, seeing as they were in college and he hadn’t seen her since the end of junior year.

Junior year... that one fateful year. That one fateful day where she just packed up and left without saying a word. No goodbyes, no I’ll miss you’s. Even though there was something there although they never acted upon it. He at least should’ve gotten some type of explanation.

All the countless nights he had spent absolutely heartbroken and alone. The ones where he would imagine the scenario that would have been being she had stayed. The one where he finally picked up his courage and asked her to be his.

And it didn’t help the fact that he had nobody to pick up the pieces she left. Being a pretty shy kid, he didn’t have anyone else to lean on. Which made it all the worse.

The rooms and the places where they laughed and spent time together seemed to haunt his mind. He would count, how many hours or days ago where they there having the time of their lives?

A text, anything. It would have been enough to soothe some of the aches. But there was nothing.

So why was she even here? Did she forget that he was aiming for this school even back then? Or was she back for him?

“Wow...” Soonyoung breathed, “this is pretty heavy. Will we be able to pull such a sad song off?”

Jihoon nodded, “Yea. You guys start choreographing and I’ll get some people to help me write the lyrics.”

On the other side of the room, Y/N was finally able to look up towards Jihoon, no longer feeling his stare pinned on her. Her heart swelled and emotions raced through her.

Seeing him staring at her nearly made her jump from shock. She totally forgot about his ambitions when trying to erase him from her memory entirely.

But she was here now... and she did owe him an explanation. But how? How could she just pick off where she left off without sounding extremely obsessive of the past?

Maybe she wouldn’t have to. Maybe she could just give closure in a way that only the two of them knew.

In a way she could convey all her thoughts. All her sorrow, all her sorries... and then she could disappear again before she could get hurt.

But even then, Jihoon, her best friend, and her love would get the message. He would know it was her way of addressing the past. And that would be as much closure as they both needed, or maybe just her.

“Leave the soundtrack to me,” Y/N said to them, smiling warmly, “I’ll have it done in 4 days and then we’ll leave 2 days for recording and then the rest of the time for the music video. With the extra time we have left over, we can finetune.”

Heechul nodded, “Yea, we don’t exactly have a concept in mind and we were hoping you’d come up with it.”

“I already had one in mind,” she said, taking out a piece of paper, “I listened to your previous submissions to the classes. Heechul and Kyunghoon have soft voices for ballads and the rest of you,” she turned to Sangmin, Kanghoon, Hodong, Youngchul, and Soogeun, “and I know you all are more visual production.”

“You’ve studied us?” Kyunghoon asked, smirking and trying not to make a dirty joke.

“Yea. For me, I’m going to write a soft, sad/ballad-like song to suit the singers. Sangmin, once I’m done with the music and writing lyrics with Heechul, I want you to be in charge of the music video. Although a sad song, I want it to have a soft meaning in the lyrics about how goodbyes are a part of life and you should remember memories fondly without stressing yourself out,” she said softly.

“You’ve given that a lot of thought,” Sangmin laughed, “I don’t think I have to do much for the video planning.”

Y/N shrugged, “Go crazy and write the lyrics Heechul, I’ll help and edit later.”

Picking up her stuff after finishing writing her ideas on paper, she headed towards the studio for composition majors. Finding an empty room, she sat down in front of the piano.

Fingers gingerly touching the keys, she conveyed her feelings into notes that would hopefully seal the deal.

“Hey.”

Her eyes snapped open, twisting her body around to see who had interrupted her composing time.

Jihoon.

“Hey,” she echoed, “Can I help you? I desperately need to hurry because my group got a late start.”

She bit her cheek, trying not to crack under his sweltering gaze that seemed to try and pierce the depths of her soul. Of course, he recognized her, it was hard to forget someone who had held such a big space in your heart.

But he hated her surely? For packing up like that without a word. Leaving him alone... in the place that he had hated. It was cruel, she was cruel. But telling him would have broken him more.

And now she was back, and everything was okay in her life again. But was it for Jihoon? He wouldn’t accept her for the way she was now, probably thinking that he didn’t mean anything to her.

Jihoon stared closely at her as she gave him a blank stare, seemingly lost in thought. Was she just playing dumb? Of course she was, she wanted him out of her life.

“Oh um-” he licked his lips, trying to find words, “I thought you seemed really familiar.”

He groaned internally, what the hell was that? Ah, what a stupid thing to say when she was clearly the same person.

Y/N smiled a strangely soft smile, “Do I?”

There was something about that damned grin. Like she knew something that he didn’t. Like she was baiting him, and deep within like she was hiding something- hiding herself and running away.

“Never mind,” he said, “I’m sorry for bothering.”

He exited the room, leaving Y/N alone. What the hell was wrong with him!? She had left without him knowing like she didn’t want him to know. Of course, she wasn’t just going to tell him.

He should have known better than that. Y/N was tricky to figure out, that’s why she was so entertaining to be around in the first place.

And when she left, it was as if a hole in his heart had formed. The heartache of losing his whatever they were and losing his best friend. It hurt.

It hurt that she wouldn’t tell him. It hurt that she was acting as if nothing happened. It hurt as if she didn’t know how sad he was. How much he had mourned the loss of something that could have been potentially amazing.

“Hey, you okay?” Sungcheol asked, seeing Jihoon plop down in a seat and mope.

Jihoon nodded, “Yea, let’s just start with the lyrics.”

“Yea...” Jeonghan said lazily, “we have no ideas. So save us???”

Hoshi shrugged, “I mean, I don’t know if you’ve met us because you chose a sad song, but it’s a little hard for us to write sad lyrics.”

Holding back his feelings, he felt his professional side take over. The side that would distract him from his problems as he started to write down his thoughts.

“I want the lyrics to be of someone who held back their feelings,” Woozi explained, pointing at words, “and how they want to stay thank you even though someone has left them. ”

“Who knew he had this type of side to him?” Sungcheol laughed as he read the few words, “I think this gives enough inspiration, we can help with the rest. We’ll let you have the final word though.”

Woozi nodded absentmindedly, a big difference from his usual laser-like focus. Y/N did things to him that he didn’t know was possible.

That was possibly why she was so good for him. She put him out of his comfort zone... but not in a bad way. Maybe that was why he tried his hardest to stay strong when he literally felt like he was only half.

Would they have the chance to smile together like that again? Would she finally appear back in his life?

And now with the chance, he wouldn’t let her get away again. Because second chances were rare, and he guessed he was just a lucky person.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Y/N tapped her fingers on the table absent-mindedly as her group crowded around her laptop, listening to the recording.

She was pretty proud of it, considering she had written it in a short time period of 4 days. And from the looks on her group’s faces, they thoroughly enjoyed the sound as well.

“It’s so miserable,” Ho-dong snorted, “it works for the concept.”

Kanghoon rolled his eyes, “It’s no sadder than your miserable acting skills. How are you going to convey this?”

As the two giants argued, Heechul had already taken out a pen and started to scribble and fix his old lyrics.

“The tune is inspiring,” he admitted, “almost as inspiring as my good looks. I think I can write really good lyrics for this. They were already good, I can just make them better”

“I’ll help,” Y/N replied back, “I have a few ideas of my own.”

For once, goofy Heechul turned serious as they began to banter with words back and forth.

Jihoon was staring at Y/N yet again. The close proximity between the other pretty male and stunning female made him uncomfortable.

And admittedly quite worried. Was he the only one who was overthinking things? Something old from all the way in high school plagued his thoughts.

It was immature in a sense. He was dragging something out that maybe shouldn’t be dragged on. But he couldn’t help it. He didn’t want to stop because if he did he wouldn’t have anything to busy himself with.

He would start to cry again, and then he wouldn’t be able to see her. And all he wanted was closure. He didn’t need a second chance although his heart desperately cried out for one.

“Here are the lyrics,” Jihoon said, pushing the final efforts of Sooyoung, Jeonghan, Sungcheol, and him on the table, “It took a while because I had a really specific image for this song but here it is.”

Jun and The8 once again had little to no lines, since they were mainly in this project to bring their emotion translation grade up from their musical performance class.

“I also went ahead and made each of you a track of the initial idea of how you will sing/rap the parts,” Jihoon explained, “it should be in your email. Listen to it tonight so we can start recording.”

At the same time, a Heechul and Y/N vs. Everyone else in that group was happening as the guys took a look at the lyrics and choked on air.

“Who do you think you’re trying to fool with these deep cool guy lyrics?” Youngchul laughed teasingly.

They stared at the male, unamused with his try for attention.

“Who do you think you’re fooling trying to be relevant with your comment?” Soogeun fired back, “you made the comment no fun.”

“So we can’t forget even after a long time. So we can remember. Let’s look back today. Place it in our closed eyes. Push it to our dreams until we fall asleep,” quoted Sangmin, reading a verse out loud.

Kyunghoon tilted his head, “Would we be able to pull this off?”

“I think you can,” Y/N commented, “you just need to stop being such a piece of trash and start focusing. Sangmin, I think you should go ahead and make up some plans for the music video and reserve locations for shooting. Kanghoon, go sign our names for recording tomorrow and the day afterward. Same time for both days, choose a time in the afternoon.”

Hodong and Yongchul stared at the female, expecting her to tell them to do something. And to be honest... they were just here for the show. They didn’t actually help too much with anything except filling in extra spaces in the video.

“Actually,” she murmured to myself, “can you go get me a girl lead who’s willing to take time out of her schedule to shoot for us Hodong? Say it’s for Heechul, they’ll agree to that since he’s pretty popular. And Youngchul... go find me a high school uniform for all of you guys that will fit.”

With everyone off to do what she said, Kyunghoon, Heechul, and she finally were able to get some peace and quiet and properly think of more lyrics.

And with Kyunghoon, they could just make him sing the lyrics before discarding the old words and replacing them with the new.

“Are we not going to talk about the way Jihoon’s just staring at you?” Heechul asked her cheekily.

She rolled her eyes, “No-”

“Well, there are only a few reasons for why a man stares at a female,” Kyunghoon also comments, his perverted side well on the way of taking over.

“Oh my god,” Y/N groaned, exasperated, “can you guys stop being so dirty. We’re trying to write sad lyrics.”

Wiggling their eyebrows, the Kyungchul pair left the topic at rest but couldn’t quite focus on the song.

“Just leave,” Y/N rubbed her temples, “take a break and then I’m grilling you guys for during recording.”

They left the class (the teacher was letting everyone leave to find ‘inspiration’) and she frustratedly put her headphones on, trying to find sad songs to fuel her feelings. After talking to Heechul, Y/N never could be sad or angry. He had helped her so much earlier in her life and it just made her feel thankful that he was so humble about everything and carried on the way he always did,

it was just his positive effect he had on everything. And even though he was talking about Jihoon, the person who was connected to her sad thoughts, he somehow made it fun.

But like all things that have happened to her, happy things come to an end and fade into memories.

Tiredly, she put her stuff down, deciding it was a good time to rest as well. It would serve as good since every time Y/N had closed my eyes the past nights, angsty thoughts filled her brain.

Which then led to her seizing the chance to further express sadness in the song. It was safe to say that at this point Y/N was so tired the thoughts would just lull her to sleep.

She was already feeling the drowsiness take over as her eyes fluttered, half open half awake. And although she needed to strap her things onto her body so nobody stole them, she found it hard as her fingers started to fumble.

When she finally was able to put her head down, black took over her vision. And the for the first time in a while, she fell asleep in class.

Taking a break from the quiet chaos his group members were making while humming their parts all at once, Woozi saw a hunched figure.

Laughing silently to himself, he remembered when he would have to wake the girl up or she would get in trouble.

Much hasn’t changed on the inside even if they seemed like strangers now. Purposely breaking the tip of pencil and making it look like an accident, he went towards the front of the room where she was to sharpen his pencil.

While he walked past her sleeping figure, he stole glances of her vulnerable, unguarded face. An expression that Y/N had hidden away from everyone since she got here.

Sharpening his pencil, he walked back towards his seat and once again passed her. He took a quick glance at the paper where the lyrics were written and felt a tiny spark of hope.

The time it took for us to get close, I want to remember with a smile

Sitting down back with Seventeen, he dwelled upon the short sentence. The time it took for us to get close... knowing Y/N, she was a lot like himself so she didn’t have an easy time making friends.

While getting close, it was the shortest time it took for both people. And they were both composers too, people who wrote emotion into songs.

He remembered when they were younger, they would write lyrics as messages for each other. Passing notes, when the teacher caught them, they would just explain they were writing a song.

And then during poetry projects, they would cheekily give messages to each other making the other try not to laugh and the class utterly confused.

And then when her controlling parents would trap her in her room or control her life, she would play music to talk to him so her parents wouldn’t figure out.

It would mostly be sad songs, where she was upset that he parents were so harsh. Where they were trying to control her whole life.

And he knew that her parents didn’t even like him as well. So these type of things were common where they would find songs with fitting lyrics to send to each other.

Or when they were lazy, just print out the lyrics and paper plane it. And things still hadn’t changed.

They once again were writing music to each other. He felt his heart warm at the thought, and now he was looking forward to the final copy.

And then afterward with knowing what she thought, he would be able to confront her. Because after searching and searching, she had finally come back home.

Jihoon felt a little spark of hope afterwards and found himself smiling like a fool, earning teasing remarks from his friends. Of course, this ended with him threatening them to leave him be.

Especially Mingyu. That annoyingly tall fool that tripped over his own feet always seemed to be the one that liked to test him the most. Or maybe his patience with him was shorter ever since Mingyu kept commenting on his height.

But it was all in good fun and he found himself laughing along with his friends as they continued to work hard on the song.

As class ended, Jihoon had spotted an empty spot where Y/N was sleeping earlier. She was probably working again, she never stopped.

Soonyoung had noticed the males lack of focus and fleeting glances for a while now, but decided not to speak of anything yet. He didn’t think it was his place.

“Jihoon-ah,” he said, “I think I left something in the old music room nobody uses. Could you go get it for me?”

Jihoon, “Why don’t you go yourself?”

“I need to learn my part for this song.,” Soonyoung whined, “Come onnn! You were probably going to a music room anyway.”

Jihoon rolled his eyes and got up, not saying anything. Soonyoung smiled, knowing that he would go do it.

“Thanks Jihoon.”

But he was already walking toward the music room. Jihoon knew what he was doing. He wasn’t an idiot, he knew that Soonyoung had seen him stealing glances at the H/C haired girl. He probably watched Y/N and made a guess that she’d be in this room because all the other ones were taken.

Our memories will also be there forever

He heard voices sing in harmony inside the room and he stopped before entering. They seemed busy, and he didn’t want to interrupt them. Besides, he had his own part to practice too.

Our memories will also be there forever... he thought, a smile playing on his lips. They were definitely playing this game again.

My heart won’t change, it won’t ever change even if you erase me

Jihoon smiled, he couldn’t wait.

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

When the day actually came to where they showed their videos to the class, Y/N was flipping out.

“I was sick for 2 days and when I come back you guys turned the video to shit!?” she exclaimed, running her hands through her hair, frustrated, “how does it go with the music and lyrics!?”

The group of boys stayed silent as she started to rant. She was extremely torn up about it, how would Jihoon get the message?

“Hey Y/N...” Heechul said quietly, coming up to her and pulling her to the side, “It’s okay. Your lyrics and the music is still the same.”

Her face broke, “But the video is so distracting! You don’t understand Heechul, it’s the last message I’m leaving here before I’m done.”

Then it made sense to him. Heechul’s face turned into one of realization as he connected the dots together. Her being here, the last time seeing her, her parents... and most importantly, Jihoon.

How did he forget? The Jihoon Y/N would always talk on and on about from many years ago.

“Oh Y/N...” he said, “I didn’t realize.”

She looked away, “Don’t.”

“No, I understand it now. But remember? This is your little Jihoonie,” he said, “if he’s anything like what you had said, he won’t pay attention to the video but the message.”

Y/N bit her lip, “You’re right,” she concluded, “he’s not gonna pay attention to anything else.”

“I know I am,” he said teasingly, a coy smile slipping on to his face, “now come here you little squirt.”

Y/N giggled and gave him a hug, “I’m really going to miss you, you over sized puppy.”

“You can always not go,” he said, pulling away, “it’s still your life. They can’t always control you.”

Y/N gave him a btitersweet smile, “Yes they can. Besides, I don’t have anything here left waiting for me right? We better go in, I’m sure we’re holding up the whole class. And my flight leaves today.”

“Alright, let’s go.”

Their group entered the classroom, and Y/N was right. They were the last to do so too. Everyone else already had taken a seat and the group was automatically the first to go because of so.

“Just a clarification,” Sangmin said, “I came up with the music video but the actual musical genius comes from this one,” he pointed at me.

Y/N flushed a little as the lights turned off and the video started playing on the board.

Heechul was right, even though the music video was a little ridiculous, the true meaning of the song shined through. Sometimes the class would laugh when they saw what happened on the screen, but watching Jihoon’s face, I knew that he could tell.

After the video wrapped up the class clapped and the boys took a seat. Y/N, however, stayed in front of the class.

“Thank you for having me for a short period of time,” she said bowing, “regretfully, I won’t be able to stay for the rest of these songs because I have a flight to catch soon. I hope you all have a great semester.”

Y/N straightened back up after saying my goodbye and coincidentally, locked eyes with Jihoon.

She hesitated before giving a smile, ‘Good bye,” Y/N mouthed to him. She watched as his eyes widened before starting to leave.

“Wait!”

She paused, turning her head slightly. The normally quiet Jihoon had stood up in his outburst, surprising himself and everyone in the room.

“Wait,” he said again, quieter but more firmly, “don’t go.”

Y/N started freaking out internally, she had to leave now. If she stayed any longer, she wouldn’t want to go. She had to go.

“I’m sorry, I must really leave-”

“Stop it!” Jihoon raised his voice, “Stop acting like you don’t remember! Don’t turn away from me again. Please,” he pleaded.

“I really have no idea-” Y/N started.

“I couldn’t express my feelings because I was too young,” he sang, “I wanted to be your tomorrow so I lived today.”

Y/N shook her head, “No Jihoon look-”

“Ever since the first day I saw you until now,” he continued, “In my heart, it’s only you...”

“Jihoon,” Y/N said softly, hands covering her mouth in shock.

At the exact moment, the teacher started playing the music on the screen and his group had come up next to him.

“Just watch and listen,” Jihoon pleaded, “please.”

And so Y/N stayed and watched the performance. The whole time, her eyes followed Jihoon, who kept his eyes on her. Their movement was elegant and synchronized and everyone found themselves drawn to their performance.

Y/N found herself becoming more and more reluctant to leave as she heard the lyrics. Tears started building up, but not quite falling.

Her parents would kill her if she didn’t leave. They hated the idea of her being in music already and they hated Jihoon for influencing her even more. They were sending her to a boarding school in Germany in order for her to get her priorities straight.

If she stayed, it’d only be trouble.

But if she stayed she would be with Jihoon. It was Jihoon for her, it had always been him.

The song ended and Jihoon came up to her, “Please,” he repeated, “stay here.”

And at the tender look in his eyes, she threw her arms around him. Jihoon was it for her, and he had always been it. The first time she made the mistake of letting him go.

“I’ll stay,” she whispered, “I’ll reason with my parents, heck I’ll reason with my aunts and uncles or my grandma and grandpa. But I’m staying.”

Jihoon squeezed her back, “I’m never letting go.”

He leaned in and so did she, “And I’m never going to go again.”

They shared a kiss at long last, the years building up to this moment finally paying off. Second chances were rare, but they guessed they were just lucky.

OH DUDES

FINALLY FINISHED THIS

I started this.... Summer of 2017 and totally forgot about it? I’m just going to go push things out and hopefully they’ll be good.

I hope you guys liked it! I might do like a little funny after ever after short story for this later if I’m not lazy and if people actually read this. I’ll link it here if I ever do.

-Panda

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jarrettfuller · 5 years

Text

Conan, Late Night Talk Shows, and Multi-platform comedy

1. Apartment 103

My college roommates and I were close. There were four of us — Ryan, Eric, Dustin, and me — and during the two years we lived in Apartment 103, we did everything together. We ate dinner together, around the table, like a family. We bought a Christmas tree together and made stockings for each other. We went to movies and watched every season of The Wire and Dexter. That apartment was the first place outside of my childhood house that felt like home.

It was the end of the semester and Ryan and Dustin had already gone home for the holidays; only Eric and I were left. He had made eggnog earlier in the day (as you do) and at 11:30pm, we sat in front of the television to watch Conan O'Brien's final night as host of The Tonight Show. I had just started getting into late night talk shows and was obsessed with the Tonight Show debacle. Here’s a quick refresher: in 2004, Jay Leno announced he was retiring from The Tonight Show and handing the show over to Conan O'Brien, then the lost of Late Night. At the beginning of 2009, Conan took over and the ratings dropped. NBC, in a panic, didn't want to give Conan the time to find his footing, and after a mere nine months, announced they were moving the Tonight Show back a half hour and giving Leno a new show at his old time. Conan quit and the network gave Leno his old show back. In the ten years since, Leno retired again, and every other talk show got a new host. Conan found a new home on TBS where he's been chugging away, doing his thing, quietly becoming the longest running talk show host of the current era.

Conan was never my favorite host — Letterman always held that spot for me, and now it’s Stephen Colbert of the current lineup 1 — but I always found him the most interesting of the bunch. Certainly more interesting than Leno and Fallon, and I was sad to see him lose the show2. Watching that final show with Eric — the images of Conan on The Tonight Show set, playing guitar with Max Weinberg and Will Ferrell as the credits rolled — is one of my strongest memories of late night talk shows, and certainly a highlight from Apartment 103.

2. “We’re Trying to be Anarchists”

Late last year, Conan announced that his now almost decade old TBS show would move to a half-hour format. The change would allow him to try new things on the show while also expanding his popular digital presence. Over the last few months, while the show was on hiatus, Conan launched a podcast, went on tour, and announced a new website that will archive every episode of Conan's shows. The shorter show would allow Conan to do more of what he does well — the travel shows and web exclusives like Clueless Gamer have proven surprisingly successful. By reducing the run-time for his TBS show, he'd have more time to devote to these extracurricular experiments while also easily playing with what the show itself can be.

On the new Conan, the desk is gone, the suits are gone, the band is gone. The set has been rebuilt, now just a small stage that can be reconfigured depending on what they are doing. Andy Richter is still there on the side of the stage. And Conan is still Conan. In the first few episodes I watched, the show felt largely the same, just shorter. As Rob Harvilla wrote for The Ringer, it was "addition by subtraction". The show obviously looked new and everything felt looser but the structure was still there: a monologue, a sketch or prerecorded bit, and an interview.

No show knows what it is in the first episode; or even the first year. The mistake NBC made in 2009 was jumping the gun, not giving Conan the time and space he needed to settle in and make the show his. It's hard to remember now, but Colbert's first year on the Late Show was rocky; with constant rumors that CBS wanted to swap his timeslot with James Cordon. And of course when Conan took over for Letterman back in 1993, he was rumored to be on a week-to-week contract. We shouldn't judge the new show by one week of episodes but it feels underwhelming after months of hearing how the new run-time would allow the show to be more experimental. Perhaps they are still easing their way into it, perhaps they still aren't sure what they can do. But for this new show to be truly exciting, it needs to get weirder. Conan needs to lean into what makes Conan Conan. There's still a lot of potential here.

Every time a new host takes over a franchise, there is a chance to mix up the standard talk show format popularized by Johnny Carson — there’s the monologue, a desk bit or a skit, two guests or three guests, and a musical act or stand up set — but each reincarnation is largely more of the same. Sure, Colbert made the monologue his own, where they often clock in well over ten minutes. Seth Meyers performs his monologue behind the desk. James Corden and Jimmy Fallon focus more on games and viral-style videos but it’s still just a white guy in a suit sitting behind a desk telling jokes and talking to people. It's a design problem, really: how do you work within the constraints of the format while making something your own? “We’re trying to be anarchists, but I’m trying to be a good boy and do a good job for the network,” Conan told Dave Itzoff of The New York Times. What he’s engaged in now, he said, “is this gradual progression toward me making the job fit me more — what do I like?”

That’s the tension with late night talk shows — especially with established francises like Tonight or Late Night: how do you honor the form that's been honed down over the last three decades while creating something new. Conan, perhaps more than any other late night host, has pushed himself up against that dominant form to question what else it could be. Sometimes, like Colbert or Seth Meyers, you find ways to work within in the system. But for Conan, the best way forward, I think, is to throw away that tradition and making something wholly his own. With TBS, he found a partner that gives him the space (and time) to try new things and make the show more like him. But the other, more important, question is: how central is the show to Conan's new output.

3. Building Your Own Printing Press

Ten years ago, around the same time I was watching the final episodes of Conan's Tonight Show with Eric, I started to get interesting in media distribution. The iPad would come out a few months later and this was when the first paywalls were being erected around newspaper websites. As someone who was always publishing little things online, I was excited by the potential and increasingly low-bar to entry. I wrote an essay for the now-defunct blog I kept through college on these changes and wondered out loud whether Conan even needed a new network. The essay — titled “Building Your Own Printing Press” — is no longer online but used the A.J. Liebling’s popular aphorism, “Freedom of the press is only free for those to own a printing press” as my starting point. The internet, I argued, gave everyone their own printing press. Conan was my prime example. Here's the key paragraph:

Under his exit contract with NBC, Conan O’Brien is unable to join another network until after September 1. So what will he do until then? Mr. O’Brien finds himself with a lot of free time and a lot of cash which make for the terrific combination to fully embrace independent media. It would be extremely easy for Conan to launch a new show without any network, contract, and deals and it could be all online, the way his fans watch him anyway. He would get to do his show, the way he wants to do it and not have to worry about networks giving him a hard time. The way we are consuming our media is changing and it’s about time the distribution caught up.

That was in 2009 — I was an overly optimistic (and arrogant) college student — and I realize now how much harder that would have been a decade ago. But now, in 2019, it is possible. YouTube stars are a thing. Instagram influencers is a term we now say without flinching. And it's exactly what Conan is now doing. Conan and TBS have entered a deeper partnership and are careful to continually point out the "show" isn't the only part of that partnership. There's already a podcast and a recently finished tour and I imagine we can expect more of that. Under the new contract, Conan can record as much as he wants each day and only owes TBS a half-hour. The rest can go online, or in any other place it fits. The format I wished for ten years ago probably wasn't financially possible then but it certainly is now.

This raises the question: how important is the TBS show to this new multi-platform comedy empire (ugh)? If anything, the show has been reduced to just another spoke in the wheel. By devoting less energy specifically to the show, each component can shift more freely. It’s here that Conan is truly subverting the late night form.

This is what I couldn’t quite reconcile ten years ago: Conan is on TV but his fans aren’t watching TV. The late night talk show is an archaic format; a relic from another era. Appointment viewing isn’t how people watch television anymore. (Think about how many times Netflix has tried to get into this area. So far they’ve been unable to crack it because it goes against Netflix’s whole model.) These shows are increasingly being watching in bits and pieces on YouTube the next morning. I’ve never seen an entire episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers but I’ve watched every single one of his A Closer Look segments.

Instead of prioritizing the show, Conan gives everything — the show, YouTube, his podcast — equal weight. It’s appealing to both sides of the generational divide, both packaged for TV and distributed across the web. You can watch it as a traditional talk show or online in short clips. While late night viewership decrease on television, they are increasing online. Much like newspapers and magazines struggled to get their content online in the early days of the web, so to are television networks still figuring out how to go digital. For many of these other shows, segments are clipped for YouTube or there’s a separate team making original content for online venues (that often feels like it’s separate from the show.) The other networks and hosts can take a cue from Conan and TBS, fully integrating the two, giving equal weight to both sides. As Conan said in another interview, perhaps in five years people won’t even notice that the “show” — in the traditional sense that we think about it now — is completely gone. Under this new model, it’s not impossible that ever-so-slowly, everything moves online.

Content-wise, Conan will find his footing within the new show. These first few weeks are testing the waters, being a beginner all over again. But it’s important to not overlook how much he’s already trying something new. This openness to different media platforms is, I think, the future of the genre. At least, it’s the future I wanted when I was sitting there in Apartment 103. I haven’t sat down at 11:30 to watch The Tonight Show since.

1. I’d also put Dick Cavett on my list right along Letterman, but his show never felt connected to the big four: Tonight, Late Night, Late Show, and Late Late Show. It always seemed like he always was doing his own thing. ↩

2. I’ve long held a theory about the Tonight Show. Letterman famously wanted it in the nineties after Carson retired — and Carson supposedly saw Letterman as his rightful heir — but the show went to frequent guest host Jay Leno. When Leno retired again in 2013, Jimmy Fallon took it over and is the current host. The Tonight Show is a brand name — that’s the popular show. It has to be generic, inoffensive, appeal to the most people. Letterman wouldn’t have been good on Tonight — he’s too smart and too weird. Same with Conan. Leno and Fallon and can do that. They are less interesting, better at appealing to the widest audience possible. ↩

#conan o'brien #late night talk shows #comedy #conan #stephen colbert #jay leno #jimmy fallon #seth meyers #the tonight show #media #media distribution #technology #television

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daehwifi · 6 years

Text

[PART 1] COLLEGE ! | KIM DONGHAN

- admin min

genre: fluff member: kim donghan word count: 1, 546 requested: no side notes: yikes I’ve been on hiatus for so long because of finals and semester switches I’m really sorry but I’ll try to be more active from now on

August had came around a little too fast for your liking as you took your first step onto the bustling college campus

everyone had known where they were going as multiple people bumped into you, attempting to scurry to their classes on time

as you made your way into your new professors room, you scanned the place for a seat

arriving at the numbered chair, you cautiously set your things down, eyes roaming to the people around you to take in your surroundings

just as you were settling in, with the others finally quietting down getting ready for their lessons, the door burst open, revealing a tall boy with silver hair that framed his ethereal face.

you couldn’t help but laugh at how he had barely made it into the room, somehow managing to drop notebook after pen after textbook.

you got up out of your seat, rushing your way over to help the boy collect his things

“ Where are you sitting? I’ll bring them to your seat “ you asked him, clearly still holding his pens in your hand.

he slowly raised his finger towards a chair on the opposite side of the room.

it wasn’t exaggerated to say that you were nonetheless disappointed with his choice of seating.

thankfully your professor had walked into your classroom just as you had sat down in your seat again, taking what you thought were discreet glances at the unfamiliar boy

let me tell you, they were anything but secretive.

yet you seemed oblivious of the reason those chuckles were constantly escaping from his soft, pink lips

“ For this next activity, I’ll be pairing your up with your peers so that you’ll get a chance to meet everyone.” you heard the professors announcement.

“ G r e a t “ you thought, escaping the stress of high school peer work and this is what you get.

“ Y/n and Donghan, partner up! “ you heard the man yell.

automatically your eyes roamed the room to search for this “ Donghan “ person

the moment you made eye contact with the mysterious boy from earlier, you couldn’t help but let out a small squeal of joy.

the boy, or Donghan as he was called, was taking long but careful strides towards you from across the room, this time introducing himself to you.

“ Hello Y/n, I’m Donghan! It’s nice to meet you! I hope we can become good friends in the future! “ he greeted you with much enthusiasm .

“ Y/n, as you already seem to know “ you chuckled as you outstretched your hand to shake his.

the period of five minutes had gone by quickly, with you immediately learning that you had much in common with the dreamy boy.

the lecture soon came to an end with you placing your belongings into a small black backpack that you proceeded to throw over your shoulder.

before you could exit the lecture hall you were met with the familiar sight of Donghan

“ Before you leave could I get your number? “ he asked, eyes gleaming with the slightest bit of hope.

“ Of course “ you chuckled as you proceeded to type your digits into his contacts, not forgetting to add a few emojis next to your name.

days had passed and it was another lazy Saturday afternoon that started with you laying on the couch is strange positions that wouldn’t of been possible otherwise, if it wasn’t for the boredom controlling you

your phone pinged as the screen lit up in response to the notification

almost immediately your head shot up as you picked up your phone

“ Do you wanna go get some food today? “ - Donghan

cue your smiling like an idiot

a cute boy, possibly the best looking on campus was inviting you out right now, and there was no way in hell that you were turning that down

“ Sure! Where at? “ you replied, hoping your enthusiasm wasn’t showing through the messages.

“ Mhm, idk yet let’s choose after I pick you

up? “ - Donghan

“ Sounds good “ you replied, typing in your address

“ I’ll be there in an hour then “ - Donghan

You sighed in content as you shut off your phone, before randomly kicking the air.

clearly you were ecstatic.

6 o’clock had soon arrived as you put in the finishing touches to your outfit, it was nothing much, casual but still cute in your opinion

the sound of knocking had echoed through your apartment as a signal that donghan had arrived to pick you up

as you swung the door open you couldn’t help but let your jaw drop at how good he looked.

Donghan was wearing a pair or ripped blacked skinny jeans paired with a simple white button up, simple but yet he looked better than anything in your mind

“ Are you ready? “ he asked fiddling with his keys in one hand.

“ Yeah! “ you replied almost breathlessly as you had ran to open the door

grabbing your keychain you stepped out the door to give everything one last inspection before locking the door.

as you both headed down towards the parking lot you couldn’t help but feel that the excitement you had felt earlier was continuously rising

“ Where do you wanna go? “ his voice interrupted your train of thought

“ Anywheres fine, do you have any places in mind? “ you asked, truthfully you hadn’t thought of a single place to go yet considering you were rushing in that one hour to get ready

“ How about the college fair? “ he asked looking over for your approval

“ Sounds good to me “ you replied

inside though?

you could feel yourself screaming as you realized how many of your

classmates you could potentially bump into at the place, considering it was your college fair after all

right as you were in the middle of your mini freak out section, you could see the car pulling up to some distant glob of lights to which you assumed would be the area that you’d both be spending the night

“ Let’s goooooo! “ you heard Donghan shout as he ran towards the food stalls in delight

you couldn’t help but let out a chuckle at his energy, he was much like a little kid and you enjoyed how much energy he radiated.

jogging, you eventually caught up to the tall boy peering over his shoulder on your tippy toes to catch a sight of the various types of food that the vendors were selling

“ ooo! How about this? “ you exclaimed at the sight of your favorite snack food, ddeokbokki,

“ gopher it, my treat “ you heard him say, and as if you had aced a test your eyes lit up immediately asking for two servings of the chewy rice cakes.

“ Thank youuu “ you barely managed to get out as you began to stuff some of the food into your mouth.

Donghan chuckled at the sight of you, with your cheeks puffed out, and lips in the biggest smile he’d ever seen you have

it wasn’t long before you both had cleaned off both of your plates, making your way around the venue of the festival

before you knew it, you had been attracted yet again by the sight of food

without even comprehending what you were doing, you quickly grabbed Donghan’s hand, intertwining your fingers together, pulling the blushing boy towards an ice cream stall

“ Which flavor do you like? “ you asked before turning back to the display case, eyes never once going dull

“ U-uh Vanilla? “ he almost questioned, mind still blank from your sudden actions

“ Two scoops of vanilla please! And one scoop or strawberry on a wafer cone would be great “ he heard you order.

Donghan didn’t know whether to let you continue holding his hand or to retract it, but in the end he knew that he wasn’t about to complain about a pretty girl’s unintentional movements.

“ Here you go! “ you exclaimed as you handed him his cone

“ Thanks Y/n “ he replied, cheeks blushing a slight tint of red from earlier that still hadn’t gone away

“ No problem no problem “ you had just repeated as you began to lick the cold treat holding his hand had become something so natural to you that you hadn’t noticed your intertwined fingers

that was until Donghan had pulled away after you suggested he join a dance battle for fun

little did you know the boy was so good at it?

you stood there, mouth wide open in awe as you watched him execute each move perfectly, who would’ve known he was this perfect at everything

you could hear the loud cheers and even occasional whistles of the crowd that had gathered, and you had somehow felt so proud

donghan had shot you a bright smile from the center of the crowd, and even then he looked stunning

the warm summer breeze blowing through his silver hair paired with the blurred out lights in the background had managed to make him seem like even more of a dream.

#jbj #kim donghan #donghan kim #donghan #jbj scenarios #jbj imagines #jbj donghan #kpop #kpop imagines #kpop scenarios #drabble #donghan scenarios #donghan imagines

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hale-of-stiles-heart · 7 years

Note

High school au: sassy gay cas and jock dean

This turned into nerd!Cas more than anything, but I hope you still like it! (also on ao3!)

If the text had come from virtually anyone else, Dean would have immediately thought it was a come-on.

But seeing as it was from none other than Cas, the potentially suggestive statement was mollified into a matter of fact announcement. My siblings will all be out of the house this afternoon. You can come by around four o'clock.

Even knowing who it was from and the exact intent behind the words, Dean couldn't help but let his mind wander to the more provocative side of the message. He was a horny bisexual teenager for God's sake, who could blame him?

Especially since Cas was practically the epitome of sex. He had the dark, tousled hair of someone who had just been thoroughly fucked, the kind of perpetual five o'clock shadow that called to mind some kind of male model.

His eyes, big and bright and impossibly blue, would piercing and analytical. Dean wondered what they would look like when softened by pleasure, the light irises overtaken by his dilated pupils.

His lips were obscenely pink, plump and perfect and unbelievably enticing. They looked slightly chapped, constantly making Dean wonder if they would be rough if he kissed them. Among other things.

Essentially, Cas was like an angel come to Earth, gorgeous and ethereal and hot like burning. The only problem with that was that Cas actually acted like a little angel.

While Dean was a jock in every sense save for the stereotypical stupidity, captain of the football team and a proud grease monkey on the weekends, Cas was the embodiment of a nerd.

He was valedictorian of their class to the surprise of absolutely no one, not even people who deemed themselves too cool to care about class rankings. Dean wasn't sure what exactly Cas' GPA was but he had suspicions that it was near 5.0, if not surpassing it.

Needless to say, Cas was ridiculously smart. Mind-blowingly. Astonishingly. Sometimes overwhelmingly.

He knew about everything from ancient theological theories about the Bible to the most recent breakthroughs in the realm of astrophysics. And boy could he talk about anything and everything in between.

While usually soft-spoken and awkwardly taciturn, enough for people to have mistakenly presumed that he was mute, Cas could talk for hours on end. He just needed someone to spark the conversation.

That was part of the reason why the poor guy had a reputation for being painfully awkward. Of course, it was true and half the time Cas seemed a zebra amongst horses but it still provided fodder for all kinds of nasty rumors.

His heavy involvement in a whole score of school-sponsored clubs deemed nerdy by his peers didn't help, either. In true nerd form, Cas was on the debate team, chess team, and the quiz bowl team.

Hell, Cas even dressed like a nerd. He may not have worn glasses but he constantly showed up to school in button-ups and slacks and shined shoes. He was even known to wear a tie occasionally, sweater vests too.

But none of that mattered to Dean. Well, it did, but it took a backseat to the more important fact that Cas was amazing and Dean had it bad for him.

Which is why, when he received the perfectly innocent text from the dorky little guy, his mind took the expressway straight to a daydream full of depravity and wistful lust. His head immediately filled with all kinds of ideas about what two people could do in a big, empty house.

And not one of those things he imagined had anything to do with studying or tutoring. The latter of which was the only reason Cas was inviting him over in the first place.

While Dean was usually a rather good student himself — he was smart despite what many people expected from him, more than a pretty face who could play football ― he had wound up falling a little behind in English. He had been too busy practicing for the big homecoming game to study for his first big English exam of the school year.

In his defense, football might get him a scholarship that would actually let him go to college while knowing just what exactly Hamlet's tragic flaw was wouldn't. (It was his inability to act, Cas had informed him.)

Because his grades had started to slip, his uncle Bobby had inquired with the school about getting Dean a tutor. Dean's English teacher had been all too happy to comply, immediately looking into the available student tutors.

Dean had dreaded it, at first. He had been sure that he was going to wind up with some asshole who treated him like dirt just because he wasn't in all honors classes.

But instead, he had been paired up with Cas.

Cas, who was patient and never faulted Dean for occasionally struggling with some of the more difficult aspects of their English curriculum. Cas, who was sweet and quiet and listened to Dean's stories about football despite admitting that he didn't care for sports.

Cas, who somehow managed to make boring plays and mind-numbing poems more interesting than the most recent storylines on Dr. Sexy. Cas, who took time out of his own day to help Dean with his projects even though the school only required him to tutor Dean eight hours a week.

Cas, who shared Dean's secret love of Star Wars and Vonnegut, who vehemently agreed with Dean that Batman was most certainly a superhero. Cas, whose smile had quickly become the most beautiful thing that Dean had ever seen.

Cas, who Dean had completely fallen for.

Which is why Dean had been unexpectedly ecstatic when his English teacher announced that they were adding a project to the curriculum. Because that meant he had another reason to see Cas.

He had already decided on the topic and, with the help from his buddy Charlie, the most computer savvy person he knew, he had already finished the presentation portion. He just needed to finish the actual paper which gave him the perfect excuse to ask Cas for help.

He had messaged Cas about needing someone to proofread his paper and had, in turn, received Cas' unintentionally innuendo-laden reply.

He had a few hours to kill before four o'clock rolled around, giving him enough time to get some things in order before heading over to Cas' place.

He threw together a couple burgers for lunch, calling Sam down from his room before the little nerd got too engrossed in studying to remember to eat. It was a little disturbing just how similar Cas and Sam were.

Speaking of his tutor, Dean informed his little brother that he would be stopping by Cas' to work on his English problem. With their dad out of town, Dean wasn't too keen on leaving Sam home alone, claiming he would drop Sam off at Bobby's heading to Cas'.

Sam hadn't raised any complaints. He would probably have a blast at Bobby's where he could read all the books in their uncle's makeshift library.

So, after finishing lunch and making sure Sam had everything he would need to spend a few hours at Bobby's, Dean hopped in the shower. He scrubbed off all the dirt and grime from his day, making sure he used the fancy shampoo that Cas had offhandedly mentioned was his favorite.

After drying off, Dean had thrown on some faded jeans and a black t-shirt. And, because he may or may not have had a bit of a kink for the whole jock/nerd thing, he decided to throw on his varsity jacket.

Sam had rolled his eyes at him as they loaded into the Impala, muttering something under his breath about Dean being a horndog. Dean had gotten him back by teasing Sam about the cute new girl in his history class, Jess.

It was a short drive to Bobby's place, the salvage yard only a few blocks away from their house. Bobby and Ellen were there to greet them, Bobby busy working on the engine of his Chevelle.

After promising to pick Sam up before seven and complimenting Ellen's new haircut, Dean started towards Cas' house on the other side of town. It was nestled on the outskirts of the richie rich part of town where assholes like Dick Roman and Crowley lived.

A huge white colonial, the house was big enough to accommodate Cas' scores of siblings and then some. There was a willow tree in the spacious backyard by a wooden bench, a swing hanging from one of the thicker branches.

The street in front of the house was clear, Cas' siblings' cars gone as he had implied they would be. The only vehicle in sight was Cas' ridiculous pimpmobile that was parked in the driveway.

Dean rolled his eyes as he parked in front of the house, putting his baby in park. Grabbing his bookbag and pocketing his keys, Dean climbed out of the Impala and jogged up the stone walkway to the front door.

"Give me a moment, please!" Cas called when Dean knocked on the door, sounding a little flustered. It was kind of adorable. And by kind of, he meant it was beyond adorable and he was seconds away from swooning like a nurse on Dr. Sexy.

When Cas opened the door a minute later, he looked flustered, too. His hair was mussed and his cheeks were slightly flushed, tinged a light shade of pink.

Like the nerd he was, he was wearing a white button-up with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a light gray and blue argyle sweater vest. It was Saturday and he looked runway ready. Fucking typical.

He greeted Dean with a polite smile, moving aside to let him into the foyer. Closing the door behind him, Cas asked, "You need me to proofread your paper, yes?"

"Yeah, if you don't mind," Dean confirmed, following Cas into the living room where they usually studied. The TV was on, the opening credits of some nature documentary about bees playing.

"It's no problem at all," Cas assured him, taking a seat on the couch. He gestured for Dean to do the same as he grabbed the remote from the coffee table. Handing it to Dean, he explained, "Feel free to watch something while I read through your paper."

"No problem, man," Dean replied, already digging through his bag for the rough draft of his paper. He presented it to Cas with a bright smile, disproportionately proud of it.

Pulling a red pen out of his pocket, Cas leaned back against a gray throw pillow, taking the essay from Dean's hands. Crossing his legs, he started reading, absentmindedly chewing on the end of the pen.

Just as absentmindedly, Dean flicked through the channels without even glancing at the screen. His attention was fixated on Cas, from the curve of his slightly stubbled jaw to the soft blue of his pretty eyes.

That was usually how their study sessions went. Cas would look over Dean's work, eyes peeled for any glaring mistakes, while Dean gazed at him dreamily.

Yes, it was pathetic and yes, it was a cliche, but that was the way it was. And it wasn't going to end anytime soon. Especially not if Cas continued to look that freaking good in a sweater vest.

Cas hummed occasionally, nodding his head as he squinted down at the paper, not for the first time making Dean wonder if he needed glasses. He circled a few things with his red pen, probably tiny grammatical errors that would get Dean a few points deducted.

Dean kept staring at him, captivated by every little thing about him. The way he chewed on the end of the pen, the way he smiled softly while reading through Dean's paper, the way he absently swung his foot back and forth in the air.

He was yanked out of his reverie when Cas cleared his throat.

"This is very good, Dean," he announced, flashing Dean a bright smile. Recapping the pen, he tucked it behind his ear and continued, "You make some very good points about Shakespeare. There are a few grammatical errors but they can easily be remedied."

"Yeah?" Dean asked, rubbing the back of his neck. There was something about being the sole focus of Cas' bright blue gaze that never failed to make him flustered.

"Yes," Cas confirmed, nodding enthusiastically. "I don't think you needed me to look over it all. I suppose you no longer need me to tutor you."

"We can still hang out though, right?" Dean squeaked, not even caring how desperate and pathetic he probably sounded.

Cas blinked in surprise, his eyebrows shooting up to his hairline. He looked adorably confused as he announced, "Of course. But I'm surprised that you want to."

"What? Why?" Dean questioned, tipping his head to the side, a mimicry of Cas' habit.

It was Cas' turn to get flustered, his eyes widening as his cheeks flushed. He turned his head, lowering his eyes to the coffee table that was suddenly fascinating. Scratching his neck, he explained, "Because I'm me and you're you."

"Uh, yeah. That's kinda how life works, dude," Dean replied, beyond baffled.

Cas rolled his eyes before meeting Dean's gaze again. With a self-deprecating laugh, he clarified, "You're a quarterback, Dean. A jock. A 'cool kid'―" Dean tried not to laugh at Cas' air quotes "―I'm just a nerd. A weirdo."

"You're a lot more than that, Cas," Dean argued, feeling rather indignant on Cas' behalf. Someone had to be.

"Then what am I?" Cas inquired with a beleaguered sigh. He looked and sounded exasperated, resigned to his fate.

Sounding more confident than he felt, Dean puffed out his chest and boldly declared, "Well, if you want, you could be my boyfriend."

The result of Dean's words was instantaneous. Cas' jaw actually dropped, his face flushing a deep red. His voice was barely audible as he shakily warbled, "Really?"

"Of course, dude," Dean said, beaming widely. He shifted his hand to lay it over Cas', giving a reassuring squeeze.

As Cas leaned in to shyly peck Dean on the cheek, sweet and chaste and ridiculously nerdy, Dean resolved to send Bobby some flowers.

#high school au #alternate universe #jock!dean #nerd!cas #tutoring #tutor!cas #football player!dean #getting together #poleth99

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exploringsocialinformatics · 4 years

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Blog #2: Do Androids Dream Of Tenured Positions?

I wrote this in response to the article “Imagine How Great Universities Could Be Without All Those Human Teachers” by Allison Schrager and Amy Wang. I chose to write about it because of my background in education, because I feel like I really benefited a lot from the personal connections I made with my human professors in undergrad and also because I’m scared of robots.

I admit that the concept of AI does terrify me a little so I really had to reevaluate my anti-robot bias as I tried to figure out exactly where I stood in the fairly confusing lane between AI technology as a helpful assistant and AI technology as a terrifying force coming to steal jobs from professors. After careful consideration, though, I’ve come to a firm conclusion: not only should AI/automation in general not be wholesale replacing human labor, we don’t actually have to let it wholesale replace human labor. Inevitability sometimes only exists because we make something inevitable. The robots aren’t making themselves.

Or. . .I guess they kind of are, but--you know what I mean.

The choice to replace any job with AI technology instead of utilizing AI and adapting that job to both benefit the worker and to add more diverse tasks that couldn’t be accomplished by a machine is fundamentally a choice in favor of profit over people. I realize that it’s naive to think that major corporations or even universities might choose people over profit but, with the smallest percentage of hope I have left for the world, I know that it’s at least an option.

For example, the McKinsey Institute (not a group of folks who I would assume would be pushing for human decency) has laid out plans for the future of retail workers when automation is more of an established presence in their establishments. They reference already existing examples, writing, “Several grocers, for example, are creating new roles for in-store pickers and e-commerce distribution centers. [. . .] Meanwhile, McDonald’s has not only introduced table service in restaurants but also rolled out self-service ordering kiosks. Best Buy has pushed further into adjacent services, creating new customer-service roles in its In-Home Advisor and Total Tech Support programs and retraining employees for them” (Begley, Hancock). The ideal here is shifting labor, not replacing it.

With all of that in mind, I feel compelled to take a moral stance here: this is less an issue of technology and more an issue of properly compensating employees. The human ones with skin and hearts and stuff, whose humanness is often a key factor of their job. And this is especially true of educators, whether K - 12 or higher education.

The notion that AI can replace professors just goes to show the fundamental disrespect that we as a society have for educators. This is something that we can see in how little they’re paid (especially adjuncts, who don’t nearly make enough to survive [Douglas-Gabriel]). It’s also ignoring the possibility of shifting their labor. This argument requires that we’re all on the same page that higher education should be about expanding knowledge: replacing the day to day work of grading or answering easily answerable questions with the help of AI, in an ideal world, wouldn’t mean job losses for TAs or potentially un-tenured professors. If universities properly focused their money (for example, focusing more on professors than administration [Lewis]), academics and robots could peacefully co-exist. Imagine a world where professors won’t have to worry about minutiae and instead have time to focus on research and writing and other things that are the reason they got into academia and that will actively make them better teachers. Imagine a world where TAs get real world experience actively helping with that research. Professors who have more time to work with students one on one! To write grants! To live more fulfilled and meaningful lives!

It’s exciting!

Again, naive and probably idealistic, especially considering that this would require universities to radically change their budgets. It would be also likely require more funding and more specified funding from the federal government for public universities. These are both very large feats.

In his paper Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? David H. Autor backs up my idyllic academic vision when he states that, on top of replacing labor, “automation also complements labor, raises output in ways that lead to higher demand for labor, and interacts with adjustments in labor supply” (2015). Essentially, the purpose of automation should be to make life easier for people, not to displace them.

There are a few significant arguments in favor of focusing more funds on AI in academic institutions that I find compelling, many of them focused on the students. On a base social level, I would probably have been more comfortable addressing a robot as an anxious undergrad than I would my professors and having a resource that would be available more frequently than a human could possibly be would be a comfort. Schrager and Wang explain the software created by the company Hobsons and how it can figure out demographics that might be struggling and use it to identify specific students that are close to dropping out. This is described as “granular,” (3) which is important--after all, professors are notably human. They can’t catch and parse small things like that, especially with crowded classrooms.

Another argument is that investing in technology that can directly help students and takes over the bulk of teaching saves money because you can hire fewer professors; ultimately, this could be worth the loss (7 - 8). If AI can do the menial labor behind teaching, why pay a human to do it when that requires a consistent salary and when the money could be used in ways that would more directly benefit--as was already mentioned--far more students than a single professor could reach? Kristin Houser writes, on the online publication Futurism, in regard to K - 12 teachers being replaced that “after the initial development costs, administrators wouldn’t need to worry about paying digital teachers. This saved money could then be used to pay for the needed updates to education facilities or other costs” (“The Situation to Our Education Crisis”), which seemingly supports the same claim about colleges. She also adds--and I find the idea that this technology would function so efficiently and without bias far more idealistic than anything I believe, but it’s still good to think about--that “digital teachers wouldn’t need days off and would never be late for work. Administrators could upload any changes to curricula [. . .] and the systems would never make mistakes. If programmed correctly, they also wouldn’t show any biases toward students based on gender, race, socio-economic status, personality preference, or other consideration” (Houser). These are all certainly elements that could positively impact education if they functioned well enough.

Even with both sides of the coin, though, there’s some evidence that the coin itself is less relevant than we think. There have been several studies which point out that automation isn’t killing off manufacturing jobs at nearly the rate that people have been expecting. Jared Bernstein, former chief financial advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, wrote in the Washington Post that the sharp decline in manufacturing jobs after 2000 had more to do with trade than it did automation (“Contrary to Popular Wisdom”). This was also a contentious moment in a Democratic Primary debate last fall between Senator Elizabeth Warren and entrepreneur Andrew Yang, with the former supporting Bernstein’s claim and the latter supporting the issues with automation. According to Politifacts, both the candidates were effectively right (Greenberg). So, essentially, this isn’t to say that automation isn’t part of the problem, it’s just that the situation is likely not as dramatic as economists and others have made it out to be.

Also, there certainly aren’t clear indicators that automation will be taking over academia specifically anytime soon. To say otherwise seems unnecessarily fear-inducing. As I said, though, I might be naive. Maybe college professors and TAs should be stocking up on whatever weapons are most effective against a robot uprising (. . .water?) or at least updating their resumes. If this does become a trend, though, I sincerely hope that the inherent value of good, earnest, sentient human educators is considered. As someone who primarily took undergrad classes in the humanities, the lived experiences of a professor often go hand in hand with their own education to make them more effective at relating to students. Giving up a fully realized, authentic education just for a more efficient one isn’t worth it.

Resources

Autor, D. H. (2015). Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(3), 3–30.

Begley, S, Hancock, B. (n.d.). Automation in retail: An executive overview for getting ready. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/automation-in-retail-an-executive-overview-for-getting-ready

Bernstein, J. (2018, July 12). Contrary to popular wisdom, automation is not a job killer in U.S. manufacturing. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/07/12/contrary-to-popular-wisdom-automation-is-not-a-job-killer-in-u-s-manufacturing/

Douglas-Gabriel, D. (2019, February 15). 'It Keeps You Nice and Disposable': The Plight of Adjunct Professors. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/it-keeps-you-nice-and-disposable-the-plight-of-adjunct-professors/2019/02/14/6cd5cbe4-024d-11e9-b5df-5d3874f1ac36_story.html

Greenberg, J. (2019, October 16). What's the Manufacturing Job Killer, Automation or Trade? . Retrieved from https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/oct/16/both-trade-and-automation-hurt-and-helped-jobs-whi/

Houser, K. (2018, January 17). The solution to our education crisis might be AI. Retrieved from https://futurism.com/ai-teachers-education-crisis

Lewis, N. (2017, February 17). U.S. Colleges: Where Does The Money Go? Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanlewis/2017/02/17/u-s-colleges-where-does-the-money-go/

Schrager, A., & Wang, A. X. (2017, September 27). Imagine how great universities could be without all those human teachers. Retrieved from https://qz.com/1065818/ai-university/

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mozgoderina · 7 years

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Some say bypassing a higher education is smarter than paying for a degree (Washington Post)

Across the region and around the country, parents are kissing their college-bound kids -- and potentially up to $200,000 in tuition, room and board -- goodbye.

Especially in the supremely well-educated Washington area, this is expected. It's a rite of passage, part of an orderly progression toward success.

Or is it . . . herd mentality?

Hear this, high achievers: If you crunch the numbers, some experts say, college is a bad investment.

"You've been fooled into thinking there's no other way for my kid to get a job . . . or learn critical thinking or make social connections," hedge fund manager James Altucher says.

Altucher, president of Formula Capital, says he sees people making bad investment decisions all the time -- and one of them is paying for college.

College is overrated, he says: In most cases, what you get out of it is not worth the money, and there are cheaper and better ways to get an education. Altucher says he's not planning to send his two daughters to college.

"My plan is to encourage them to pursue a dream, at least initially," Altucher, 42, says. "Travel or do something creative or start a business. . . . Whether they succeed or fail, it'll be an interesting life experience. They'll meet people, they'll learn the value of money."

Certainly, you'd be forgiven for thinking this argument reeks of elitism. After all, Altucher is an Ivy Leaguer. He's rolling in dough. Easy for him to pooh-pooh the status quo.

But, it turns out, his anti-college ideas stem from personal experience. After his first year at Cornell University, Altucher says his parents lost money and couldn't afford tuition. So he paid his own way, working 60 hours a week delivering pizza and tutoring, on top of his course load.

He left Cornell thousands of dollars in debt. He also left with a degree in computer science. But it took failing at several investment schemes, losing large sums of money and then studying the stock market on his own -- analyzing Warren Buffett's decisions so closely he ended up writing a book about him -- for Altucher to learn enough about the financial world to survive in it. He thinks he would have been better off getting the real-world lessons earlier, rather than thrashing himself to pay for school and shouldering so much debt.

It's cold comfort, but the loans put him in good company: Hundreds of billions of dollars of national student-loan debt has now overtaken American credit-card debt, the Wall Street Journal recently reported, using numbers compiled by FinAid.org, a Web site for college financial aid information.

"There's a billion other things you could do with your money," Altucher says. One option: Invest the money you'd spend on tuition in Treasury bills for your child's retirement. According to Altucher, $200,000 earning 5 percent a year over 50 years would amount to $2.8 million.

Few families have that kind of money lying around. But if you can give your child $10,000 or so to start his own business, Altucher says, your child will reap practical lessons never taught in a classroom. Later, when he's more mature and focused, college might be more meaningful.

* * *

The hefty price tag of a college degree has some experts worried that its benefits are fading.

"I think it makes less sense for more families than it did five years ago," says Richard Vedder, an economics professor at Ohio University who has been studying education issues. "It's become more and more problematic about whether people should be going to college."

That applies not just to astronomically priced private schools but to state schools as well, where tuitions have spiked. Student loans can postpone the pain of paying, but they come due when many young adults are at their most financially vulnerable, and default rates are high. Even community colleges, while helping some to keep costs down, prompt many to take out loans -- which can land them in severe credit trouble.

According to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 31 percent of loans made to community college students are in default. (The same report found that 25 percent of all government student loans default.) Default on a student loan and face dire consequences, beyond a bad credit record -- which can tarnish hopes of getting a car, an apartment or even a job: Uncle Sam can claim your tax refunds and wages.

Now, take a key argument in favor of getting a four-year degree, the one that says on average, those with one earn more than those without it. Education Department numbers support this: In 2008, the median annual earnings of young adults with bachelor's degrees was $46,000; it was $30,000 for those with high school diplomas or equivalencies. This means that, for those with a bachelor's degree, the middle range of earnings was about 53 percent more than for those holding only a high school diploma.

But a lot of college graduates fall outside the middle range -- and many stand to make considerably less.

"If you major in accounting or engineering, you're pretty likely to get a return on your investment," Vedder says. "If you're majoring in anthropology or social work or education, the rate on return is going to be a good deal lower, on average.

"I've talked to some of my own students who've graduated and who are working in grocery stores or Wal-Mart," he says. "The fellow who cut my tree down had a master's degree and was an honors grad."

The unemployment rate among those with bachelor's degrees is at an all-time high. In 1970, when the overall unemployment rate was 4.9 percent, unemployment among college graduates was negligible, at 1.2 percent, Vedder says, citing figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But this year, with the national rate of unemployment at 9.6 percent, unemployment for college graduates has risen to 4.9 percent -- more than half the rate of the general population. The bonus for those with degrees is "less pronounced than it used to be," Vedder says.

"The return on investment is clearly lower today than it was five years ago," he says. "The gains for going to college have leveled off."

Before hackles are raised about boiling the salutary effects of higher education down to its cost, there are obvious disclaimers: Education is a priceless thing. Many high-school graduates are not ready for independence and adult responsibilities, and college provides a safe place for them to grow up -- for a fee.

But what about the lessons offered by the success stories that have unspooled along a different path? Dropouts are the toast of the dot-com world. To the non-degreed billionaires' club headed by Microsoft's Bill Gates (Harvard's most famous quitter) and Apple's Steve Jobs (left Oregon's Reed College after a single semester), add: Michael Dell (founder of Dell Computers, University of Texas dropout), Microsoft co-founder and Seattle Seahawks owner Paul Allen (quit Washington State University) and Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle Systems, gave up on the University of Illinois).

Success sans sheepskin isn't only for the technology set.

David Geffen, co-founder of DreamWorks, bowed out of several schools, including the University of Texas.

Redskins owner Daniel Snyder dropped out of the University of Maryland.

Barry Gossett, chief executive of Baltimore's Acton Mobile Industries, builders of temporary trailers, also left Maryland without a degree. (No hard feelings, apparently: In 2007, he donated $10 million to the school.)

Perhaps these are unique individuals in whom a driving entrepreneurial spirit outstripped the plodding pace of book learning.

Or perhaps they point to a new model.

"There's nothing you can't do on your own," Altucher says. A provocative idea -- and a liberating one. Even if it's not entirely true.

But you don't have to agree with Altucher to concede that the debt-stress many graduates or their parents -- or both -- are left with after tossing off the cap and gown works against the merits of the degree.

Even if a kid doesn't party his way through college, chances are he or his family has plowed a boatload of money into a few memorable classes and a lot of boredom.

On top of that, you don't know how big a boatload it'll be. For many college students, four years of anticipated tuition payments grows to five years or six -- or more. Government statistics show just 57 percent of full-time college students get their bachelor's degrees in six or fewer years.

And the rest . . . don't.

* * *

In her youth, Toni Reinhart, 55, owner of Comfort Keepers Reston, a licensed home-care agency in Northern Virginia, abandoned hopes of completing a business degree at George Mason University. There was that C in accounting, and then trigonometry. . . .

"My problem was not being able to put the time in to learn things I wasn't interested in," she says.

Has dropping out held her back?

"Oh sure," says Reinhart, a self-described late-bloomer. "But maybe that's good. Maybe it held me back from things I shouldn't have been doing anyway."

Now she manages 56 employees and in recent years hit the million-dollar mark in gross revenue.

"I understand the case for finishing, because you've proven you can stick with something," she says. "But wouldn't it be nice if we did have another path that didn't put people in debt for . . . $100,000? Isn't there another way to instill those kinds of lessons in people that would be cheaper?"

Nelson Cortez, 20, wishes there were. The Napa resident starts his third year this month at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He's received state grants and works 15 hours a week while school is in session, but with the loans he's taken out, he estimates he's already about $25,000 in debt. This is why, when the California Board of Regents last year announced a 32 percent increase in fees, he joined protests that galvanized students around the state -- and set off similar protests around the country.

Cortez helped shut down the Santa Cruz campus and traveled to the District to rally outside the U.S. Capitol. (On Oct. 2, students will demonstrate on the Mall for affordable education as part of the One Nation march, organized by civil rights and youth groups and unions.)

"Rent was due yesterday, and I was $20 short, and I'm running around the house looking for $20," Cortez says. His money problems have caused him to question whether he's made the right decision: "Am I going to be able to afford it, should I take a semester off? . . . I do have in the back of my mind, would it be better not to have those loans and just work?"

According to the Education Department, between 1997-98 and 2007-08, prices for undergraduate tuition, room and board at public institutions of higher education rose by 30 percent, and prices at private institutions rose by 23 percent -- after adjustments for inflation. "The reason colleges have been getting away with raising their fees so much is that loans allow parents to tough it out," Vedder says.

Federal government moves, such as tuition tax credits, allow those paying college costs to subtract a certain amount from their tax bills. But it does little to alleviate the financial burden, Vedder says, adding that it gives colleges an excuse to raise costs further.

* * *

The cost of college is putting the financial screws to an entire generation, say student activists.

"I think it's absolutely despicable that students are asked to pay that much," says Lindsay McCluskey, president of the United States Student Association. "In terms of public education, you can't even call that public when students are taking out an average of $25,000 to complete college and then are paying off student loan debt until they're 50 or 60 years old."

A recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she majored in anthropology, McCluskey is paying down a $20,000 student loan. She thinks it will probably take her a decade to dig out of that hole -- while the balance is accumulating interest -- because she can't afford to make more than the minimum monthly payments.

"For my generation," McCluskey, 23, says, "that loan debt is taking the place of the house we could be buying or a number of other investments we could be making in our lives. The loan debt just sucks a lot of that out."

Now consider Jeremiah Stone, 25. The graduate of Rockville's Thomas S. Wootton High School is living in Paris, pursuing a drool-worthy international career as a chef. After high school, he took a job as a barback in a Houston's Restaurant, worked up to kitchen assistant, took a nine-month cooking course at the French Culinary Institute in New York and finally landed in France, where he has freelanced as a chef throughout the country. Eventually he hopes to open his own restaurant in New York.

"People I meet for the first time, they're always saying, 'Oh, if I had another career, I'd be a pastry chef instead of becoming a lawyer,' " Stone says. In the eyes of some of his friends, he says, he's become emblematic of simply doing what you love. In his case, it turns out that not following the herd was the best investment of all.

Source: Washington Post / Sarah Kaufman. Link: Bypassing a higher education Illustration: Tim Lahan. Moderator: ART HuNTER.

#propaganda #contemporary world #postmodern thinking #neoliberal capitalism #economy #washington post #tim lahan #brainslide bedrock education talk #education #knowledge #article #free your mind

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michaelfftv · 7 years

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When I’m out shooting, people will ask- what are you doing, who are you doing that for, or what’s your favorite thing to shoot, or what do you like about photography?

37th VA Para Games, Rugby Championship

These multiple questions, I find, are invariably all inquiring about the same thing, which is, why do I chose to spend my time practicing this arcane art?

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For the truth be told, pretty much all serious still photography- by which I mean photography not taken by a mobile phone, or with a selfie stick; or by someone who actually knows and cares about such terms as composition, tone and lighting- is by common consensus, in 2017, arcane.

The truth of this sweeping statement is in the bottom line- consider this excerpt from a recent article by Peta Pixel:

Nikon dropped a couple of very troubling bombshells today. The first was a “Recognition of Extraordinary Loss” due to company-wide restructuring; the second was the cancellation of the much-delayed series of Nikon DL compact cameras announced in February of 2016.

The news is basically all bad for Nikon fans today, but even if you ignore the business side, it’s never a good sign when a company gives up on a camera series they already announced—and then delayed… and delayed… and delayed again. The DL series was supposed to be Nikon’s answer to popular premium point-and-shoots like Sony’s RX100 and RX10 series, and now it is officially cancelled.

Such problems exist industry wide and are not limited to Nikon. Such news, of course, also begs any number or other potential arguments- which I’m just going to sidestep here.

Live kill seminar, Turner Farm, Indian Hil Ohio 5/18/2017

Rather, I will simply answer the question. If DSLR’s are passe because there are better solutions, why do I still carry two heavy cameras and a heavy set of lenses- long after newspapers have taken back their photographers professional DSLR’s, riffed them, and passed out cell phones to reporters ?

I still carry DSLR’s because they do make a difference and because that difference is still appreciated. How do I know this? Can I prove this point scientifically? Probably. if I cared enough to do so, which I don’t.

Live kill seminar, Turner Farm, Indian Hil Ohio 5/18/2017

cell phone cameras are not better- although they are, invariably easier to carry and use. I fully cede the point that we are becoming a cheaper and lazier country by the moment. Yet, as far as I am concerned, DSLR’s are better and worth the hassle for a couple of simple reasons.

First, I need the exercise. I will not for love or money get on a treadmill. I will carry heavy camera gear for long distances.

North Side Fourth Of July Parade

Secondly, if photography with real cameras, have been surpassed in ease and quality by point and shoot models and or cell phones; people would not continue to request or appreciate the images generated by SLR cameras, over point and shoot and cell phone images.

If I show up at local concert or even, for instance. there’s a reason, the owner of the venue , or the tour manager will let me into the event- and give me great seats or premium access- without paying the same twenty thirty or fifty dollar, or One Hundred dollar admission fee he’s charging everyone else. And even if you do get in, it’s really unlikely your going to get the kind of access needed to get shots like this.

Third, my most persuasive remaining arguments for practicing this dark art are, and have always been, selfish; and DSLR’s serve my own selfish ends.

Why do I shoot? What do I like to shoot, why bother hauling this stuff around?

North Side Fourth Of July Parade

My answer goes back to a drunken night in college. I was on the front porch of our collegiant home with my close friend Bruce. We were having a long existential conversation- which we were want to do when we were in our cups.

Cutting to the chase I asked Bruce point black, “What do you want out of life?”

“Man,” he said,” I just want to do everything once.”

This response seemed to me so worthy and wise, that I adopted his goal as mine. Not only did I adopt that goal, I have kept that goal.

The Magic Flute, Piano Dress Rehearsal, Cincinnati Opera.

It’s a goal I’ve gleefully pursued for nearly thirty years now. It is not, mind you, an easy, or entirely happy, voyage. Such a quest invariably involves, as the great troubadour Alejandro Escavedo has noted, more miles than money, and sometimes heartbreak.

Such a journey is also logistically difficult as there are- for instance- many places for which one either lacks a plausible reason for being in that place; or, sometimes, one is barred from exploring various places because the proprietors of those places simply, and reasonably in many cases, do not want strangers snooping around.

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However, if one is careful to learn a dark art, or two, many of those doors swing open. Two of those arts are photography and writing. The tools, the arts, of story telling.

People love stories; and, more importantly, people love being the center of a good story. At the end of the day, almost all people like to hear about themselves. Thus, if you are willing and capable of, telling stories, many of those doors will open.

Pike 27, Northside Yacht Club.

This is why invariably tell people that I write (another dying art) and shoot because all too often my magical camera will change from a camera into a key or invitation. Many times a good camera and a set of proven skills with grant you entree into a place even when money will not.

And do DSLR’s tell better stories? Yes, but the argument doesn’t really even matter. The important thing is that most people believe as such.

Grayson Highlands State Park, Virgina

Grayson Highlands State Park

North Carolina Mountains

Grayson Highlands State Park, Virgina

It’s a bitter sweet truth that life is too short to allow me to reach my goal- or even come close- but that doesn’t mean trying to reach that goal is mostly bittersweet or melancholy. Quite the contrary.

In the last 8 weeks, I have Photographed the 37th annual Veteran’s Annual Paraplegic Games, specifically the Wheelchair Rugby Championships and Closing Ceremonies. The large ballroom shots above are the Closing Ceremonies.

Pike 27, Northside Yacht Club.

There were thousands of vets from across the country who attended. To qualify for the games you have to have been rendered a quadriplegic while in service of your country. These folks have every reason in the world to feel sorry for themselves, but instead they strap themselves into modified wheelchairs and act as if they are part of a human demolition derby. I played twenty years of rugby and am qualified to say, these guys are studs.

So the next time you hear some fool, in Washington, crapping out his or her mouth about who is a hero, you might want to spend some time with these men and women. I was truly honored to be able to do this shoot.

North Carolina Mountains

Sometimes, the best shoots, like the Para Games, provide serious personal and real world perspective.

I also attended a seminar about humane killing practices of animals. You can read about that almost life changing experience here.

I also covered, for about the sixth time, the Northside 4th of July Parade– which had implications, for me, far beyond a simple communal expression of patriotism.

I was also fortunate to cover the opening of the Herzog Music Store, at 811 Race Street in Cincinnati. This store, will will serve to aid the reclamation of historic Herzog Studios – which is located on the floor above, as well as sponsoring other events key to the retelling of Cincinnati’s great musical history.

I attended three concerts, including seeing friends in Pike 27 and also seeing a pretty inspirational show by Steve Earle. Being able to cover a show like Earle’s in a beautiful theater is like taking a master’s class in performance and storytelling.

I also documented a recent road trip to the very heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, as well as a trip to nearby Grayson Highland’s State Park in Virginia.

I also covered for Polly Magazine, the piano dress rehearsal of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Catch my coverage of same, here, to learn why this production was sch a memorable, and groundbreaking event.

I love the Opera. The Cincinnati Opera is a very kid and professional organization, This is the third time they have allowed me to shoot the dress rehearsal, which means, in essence, that except for thirty to fifty other people- we are provided the run of the house and are free to shoot, at will, from anywhere in the house. It’s always a special experience and not one that can be bought at any price. If you haven’t seen it before, here is a collaborative piece I did with my brother in art, Matt Steffen, about the Opera’s performance last year of Tosca.

Unknown Hinson- Southgaate House Revival, Newport Ky

The photographs in this essay are from the last eight weeks and are colorful examples of how my camera has taken me into diverse and sundry worlds and experiences, I would have never seen, save for my practice of these dark arts.

Steve Earl and the Dukes, Taft Theater Cin.

Thus the dream still lives and the dream justifies all. Thanks Bruce.

Eight Weeks of Summer 2017 When I'm out shooting, people will ask- what are you doing, who are you doing that for, or what's your favorite thing to shoot, or what do you like about photography?

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