The hole in the center of your spaghetti spoon serves a purpose: it’s just the right size to measure out a single portion of pasta. Source
(via academicfeminist)
[video]
[video]
“
1. Breathe in. It’s just a question. You can do this.
“Yeah, I do.”
Perfect. They’re smiling now.
Something small inside of you feels guilty about lying by omission, so you keep going.
Here comes the hard part.
“I do believe in God, it’s just that - I don’t really go to church anymore.”
Their smile dims, just a little.
But why?! They cry out.
You used to go to church every Sunday when you were little! Someone else intercedes.
Your nails are digging into your palm. Breathe in again, just this once.
“I know, but like, I didn’t really feel it after a while? I prefer to pray on my own.”
2. Things you remember from church:
i. The smell of incense that clung to your hair, even hours after mass.
ii. The sunlight, filtering in through the colored glass.
iii. HOMOSEXUALITY IS A SIN, I CAN’T BELIEVE GOD WOULD LET THOSE KIND OF PEOPLE GO UNPUNISHED, THEY DESERVE TO BURN IN HELL, whispered by a priest to your grandma. Your eyes water and you don’t know why.
iv. You can still recite some of the psalms by heart.
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the defense of my life; whom shall I dread?
v. Your aunt presses a rosary into your palm, one year before you swear to yourself you will never set foot in a church again. You don’t have the heart to tell her that it feels like she’s handing you a chain made of iron and lead and the weight of your guilt.
vi. Confession is always awkward and forced and you feel like your sins should be yours to deal with and yours alone, but they told you without it you’d be dirty and you believed them. You think about this when you kneel down in front of the crucifix. Jesus Christ’s eyes are closed. The small, ugly thing in your stomach is glad He is not looking at you.
3. There are roughly 52 Sundays in a year. You went to church every Sunday since you were a baby until you were 16. That makes it about 800 masses.
You do the math in your head and it doesn’t feel like 800 hours, it feels like eternities of you standing in your best clothes, forced to listen to stories of fire and brimstone and God’s righteous anger against sinners.
Very rarely they talk about how God is also love and forgiveness. Those times, it feels like you walked into another service for a different religion.
4. You realize you’re “different” around the same time they make you realize they’ll never accept you for who you are.
It hurts more than you thought it would.
5. Your faith is a fragile, small, sleeping thing nested in your ribcage.
You poke and prod and worry at it, hoping you’ll get an answer to a question you’re too afraid to ask.
6. Your family loves you and your friends love you but if there’s really a higher being
7. who created the Universe as we know it
8. and loves us all, for we are His children
9. HOW DO YOU KNOW HE HATES ME FOR WHAT I THINK FOR WHO I LOVE FOR WHO I AM
10. God punishes sinners but he also forgives them.
It took you some time to realize there was nothing to forgive, nothing to end up in Hell for, except the usual stuff, ordinary sins like white lies and feeling envious of someone else’s possessions and other human things.
The first time you walk into a church after a while you do it with a weight on your shoulders you need to get rid of.
The pews are empty and the light hits the altar just right.
You breathe in. Close your eyes.
I BELIEVE IN A GOD WHO LOVES ME, you scream in your head, and it’s loud enough to rattle Heaven.
The silence around you is calm and peaceful.
It’s exactly the answer you were looking for.
(via patroclvss)
[video]
I want to take some time to think about Soulmate AUs in broader social and historical context. (I’m sticking to the ‘first words written on your body’ version of those aus)
Thoughts on Society:
- In a soulmate universe there would be distinctly less homophobia because queerness would be both normalized and no one would be able to argue that it isn’t natural. (Not that there wouldn’t be any because people are assholes).
- Religion would be structured differently - destiny would be seen as an incontrovertible subject. “Of course you have a destiny and a place in God’s plan, just look at those words on your arm.” What words were written on the arms of Messiahs and prophets?
- Scientists attempting to explain it through genetics and physics.
- The culture of introductions would be essential. What you say to new people would be built into the culture of what is polite and it would change society by society.
- Societies with strict verbal introduction rules that limit the finding of soul mates (because what would disrupt strict social stratification than princes discovering that their soul mate is a maid).
- Societies where people craft personalized introductions and use the same line like a personal signature each time they meet someone new.
- First day of school or college or a new job being almost all meeting rituals.
- Special festivals that are dedicated to meeting new people and talking to them. Pilgrimages for young adults to go town by town to meet as many people as possible.
Pop Culture
- Massive online databases full of those first words.
- Books dedicated to the first words of famous people.
- Analyses of your words (a la astrology: because you have the word ‘time’ in your words it means…)
- Matchmakers who promise they’ll find you Your Soulmate!
- Imagine the shipping debates around TV shows: “Her words haven’t been revealed yet! So she could be his match!” or “They revealed his words in season 2 so we know his match isn’t Fred!”
Interpersonal:
- Imagine the pressure to find your match
- People who claim children raised outside of matches are more destructive and less well adjusted and at a disadvantage
- “If you have sex outside a Match you will catch chlamydia and you will DIE”
- Special marriages for matches.
- Support groups for those who find their Matches late in life.
- Imagine the family pressure in some families to never meet anyone unapproved by the family. “Your father speaks to everyone first!”
- Different marriage systems
- Flexible ones where every non-match marriage is considered voidable if a soulmate match is found. Imagine being the person left behind by someone you love and trust because of words on their skin.
- Or a system of different marriages where people have different partners for different contexts: This is my household wife June and my Match wife Alice her household husband Larry and we all make it work.
- Or systems where you can’t legally marry unless you can both show your words and prove you are a match.
- People who lie about it to avoid the social pressure inherent in finding your match. “Of course my husband and I are a match!” Or teens who lie to their parents that someone is their match because their parents disapprove of their new date.
- Parents who worry like hell about their kid’s words.
- People who fall in love with the “wrong person” because this social system means that there is literally a wrong person. But they truly fall in love. Who try and scratch off their soulmate words from their skin because FUCK destiny, we’re making our own.
- Imagine how broken you would feel if you were asexual/aromantic and you didn’t have words.
- Imagine having words that you hated. Imagine having words on your skin that were a slur or an insult or a threat and knowing that someday you will meet someone who will say that to you and they are someone you are supposed to love.
It fascinates me because the idea is so much bigger than just meet-cute scenarios and fluff fics. It would change society from the ground up.
I want to write the one in bold a little bit.
I would love to read in-depth discussion about each of these ideas. Sadly, there’s not much available. What does exist, though, is discussion about fannish tattoos, which are voluntary physical marks of things we value. Transformative Works and Cultures has a couple of interesting articles on this topic by Bethan Jones, which you can read here and here.
Growing up believing that the words have to be spoken out loud, in person, to you, but discovering it was that person you met online that one time.
(via bronzedragon)
my favorite college experience is when i had a 7am class and the kid next to me literally poured a monster energy drink into his coffee said “i’m going to die” and drank the whole thing
i knew a guy who brewed his instant coffee with monster instead of water. three cups in two hours. i think he ascended to the astral realm
the survivability of the human race never ceases to amaze me
TABI ANECDOTEMy final year I lived with engineering masters students. One night, I’m finishing up my final paper, I’m juuuust backing up my final copy, and my housemate’s cat knocks a vase over onto my laptop.
Which wouldn’t be a problem except my cable had been chewed on (thanks Kobe), so the wiring was exposed. Circuits short out, I fling myself back to avoid electrocution and by the time we get the situation handled, my laptop AND my external hard drive have been fried by the surge.
I mean, fried. Like, they-are-vaguely-smoking fried.
I start to cry, because there goes fifty percent of my final grade.
Ahmad just goes “it’s okay, we will fix”. I’m like “how the fuck do you propose that?” And he’s like “I have spare laptop.” “THIS IS DUE IN THE AM!”
And he looks me dead in the eye and goes, “I said I will help. Go get the laptop.”
So off I go. By the time I make it downstairs, there’s this chemical /reek/ in the kitchen. I go in and there he is, methodically crushing caffeine pills with the bottom of a glass on a ceramic plate, periodically dusting the powder into a cooking pot. Meanwhile, his coffee pot is chugging away on the counter.
As I watch, he takes the coffee pot, empties it into the cooking pot, lets THAT come to a boil and dumps in some of his Turkish coffee, AND the remaining caffeine pill powder, which by now is starting to look uncomfortably like coke.
He lets that steep, and by now the coffee/burning smell is so strong it’s woken up all six of the other housemates, who have all come downstairs and are vacillating between staring at my laptop and at this concoction with undisguised horror.
He pours this sludge into a mug, stirs in about four /tablespoons/ of sugar and slides it my way.
I figure that I’m probably dead either way regardless, so I suck it back, filtering the grounds through my teeth as I go.
I’ve had three sips when it hits, and I feel my heart trip on a beat. I must have gone white cause he nods, all pleased, and points me at his laptop.
Long story short, I got an week’s extension, didn’t sleep for five days, had a conversation with my BLINDS in SPANISH, and got a B+, with a note that it was an “engaging read and well-written, when intelligible”.
To this day, coffee any stronger than a pale off-beige makes my chest hurt.
I honestly thought he was going to drink the coffee and perform was magic on the laptop but.. nope. even better. Honest to god, I really want to know how that conversation with the blinds went.
Bruh. BRUH.
This is so real. LMFAOOO
I’m concerned for all of you. You at least shortened your life by ten years.
I hate to use a Mad Max reference but WITNESS ME. -chugs monster and takes midterms-
My minor is in Chemistry.
I collect chemistry glassware.
I figured out how to triple-distill and vacuum-extract coffee to raise the caffeine concentration 20-30x.
The first time I sampled a mug of the end product, I didn’t sleep for 2 days and was convinced that I could feel air molecules.
Now I drink it in shot glasses.
THE GATES OF VALHALLA ARE OPEN. WITNESS ME.
I AM SCREAMING YOU ARE AWAITED
I CANNOT STOP LAUGHING.
(via patroclvss)
winged-peach asked: ♥ OH MY GOD I LOVED YOUR EXR COMPLEMENTARY POWERS FIC ♥ It was so amazing! I would JUST LOVE to turn it into a little comic, if that's alright with you! You write amazingly, thank you so much for enriching our lives :3 Have a lovely day!
I TAKE IT BACK, I AM LITERALLY DYING RIGHT NOW, EVERYONE IS TOO NICE. Um, absolutely! Fuck yeah, make a comic, tag me in it so I can hyperventilate over how amazing literally everyone is, like…holy shit, friend, buddy, pal, you are amazing.
HOLY FUCK.
Thank you so much! You have a lovely day too!
lukalunar asked: your exr soul mate au killed me, thank you,, i loved the concept, it was so cool, and unique and ahhhhh!!!!!i love your writing!!!
Holy shit thank you so much? You are the sweetest?
This may be totally unwelcome but if you want to read more of my stuff, I’m on AO3 here (a couple Les Mis fics are in progress) and I have a writing tag on my blog here (stuff is tagged by fandom fic, like les mis fic or hamilton fic, or you can just scroll, I guess) and I am always open for prompts although it might take me a while to work through them if I get inundated at the same rate as I have today.
Thank you so much for your amazing compliment, I am literally dying right now.
@words-writ-in-starlightI seriously trust the entire Hamilton cast so much like legit if Lin, Anthony, Oak, and Daveed pulled up in a suspicious white van and told me to get in, you bet your ass I would. I’d climb in that van so fucking fast. Idk where we go or whats happening, I trust these people.