#terry is a gay disaster who always assumes the worst

[mutantenfisch]

Small Victories

Pairing:  Chargestep (Ricardo Ortega/Terry Rhys)

Summary:  The aftermath of the Psychopathor incident and Ortega’s stupid idea of kissing Terry.

Warning:  canon-typical mention of injuries

Notes: I originally planned to make this longer, to include a few more scenes, especially the reaction of the Rangers of the yellow press photo after the kiss, but i ran out of spoons halfway through this ^^; Also, I haven’t written anything i dared to show the public in well over a year so pls bear with me.

Word count:  1903

AO3 link: Here

Your head starts spinning even faster than your thoughts.

This is happening. This can’t be happening. Why? Does he really kiss me? (He does) Am I really kissing him back? (You are)

His lips are soft, so soft, and warm against yours and for a brief moment there is nothing else in your life. And you feel oh so very alive, for the first time in… ever?

You slightly shift your position and pain shoots through your leg. You break the kiss with a pained whimper and cling to Ortega for support, your fingertips digging into his skinsuit so abruptly that he makes a choked sound as well. His hands that were cupping your face moments before instinctively move down your shoulders to support you standing.

“Shit Terry, your leg!” Ortega’s face is all worried frown now, his eyes darting all over your half-revealed face and up and down your body as if he’s assessing how much damage done by Psychopathor he didn’t notice.

“It’s fine”, you manage to get out between your teeth as you fumble to pull down your mask again. “It’s only punctured, not broken. Stop fussing. I’m fine.” You aren’t. You can feel the blood running down your shin in a constant, warm flow. You’re not so sure any-more that your light-headedness is only because of what just happened. Well, it is, but also for more than one reason.

“Listen Terry, you need to –“ You interrupt Ortega with a slight punch to his abdomen. Sometimes you hate how tall he is in comparison to you.

“No! You know I won’t go to a hospital while I’m still breathing”, you hiss. As if to prove a point, you let go of him, only now noticing how stiff your fingers are from clinging to his sides for support. You manage to not whimper again when you take a wobbling step back. He must be bruised from my grip. The thought pops up but disappears as soon as the other man opens his mouth again.

“Of course you won’t. Because then a morgue would be more sensible, you idiot.” His worry is shifting into something else now, something more… personal? You can see it in the way he straightens his back and furrows his brows even more, his beautiful brown eyes boring into yours relentlessly. You can see it in the twitch of the corner of his mouth when he continues, almost pleadingly: “Seriously Terry, if it is about the bill, I’m sure I… the Rangers can –“

You don’t let him finish this sentence either. “Shut it, Charge. No hospitals. And if you’re trying to drag me into one, you’ll be needing it more than I do right now.” Your voice is cold as ice. A growl you never expected to be capable of producing. At least not for a very long time.

As you turn to limp away from the Marshal, you try to assess your wounds. Your leg hurts like hell and you begin to feel nauseous because of the pain and blood loss, a creeping tingle on the back of your head being the precursor of what will probably turn into another migraine attack as soon as the adrenaline stops overriding everything else in your bloodstream. Great. Also, your leg isn’t the only part hurting right now. Your face and shoulders are bruised, the skinsuit under your coat uncomfortably sticking to your skin where the blood has already coagulated, and either the flying debris or the shockwave from the explosion definitely managed to hit one of your ribs hard enough to make breathing painful now as well.

You take a careful breath, wincing just a little when the rib acts up. “If you really want to do something for me, then get me a ride home so I can go visit my doctor.” This is only half a lie, you’re your own doctor after all. You try not to sound too harsh, as a peace offering. Then you turn back at him again and pull the hood of your coat over your head. Not a moment too soon, as some LDPD officers are getting near the scene now that the fight is over, and their voices start brushing against your mind. That was tough. Is he really down? The other thought pattern that joins them is all too familiar and you decide now is the best time to leave the scene and tend to your wounds. Steel’s scrutinizing glare is the last thing you need right now. Especially since the look he is giving you makes you more uncomfortable than ever. You shudder and pull your hood deeper over your face.

“I… I guess I can do that.” Ortega’s voice is quiet again. This is the answer you were hoping for but something in his tone and in how his expression changes makes you feel another pain added to the mix that comes from the centre of your chest and you grimace under your mask. Oh shit. Fucking hell!! This was never supposed to happen!

You reach out to reassuringly pat him on the arm, you aren’t mad at him after all. The look he gives you when you touch him makes you pull back as if you’d been hit by one of his electric charges. You notice his eyes wandering between your hand and your face and you turn away quickly.

“Just… just let us get out of here, okay?” You don’t dare to look into his eyes.

 __________________ 

Even with your mask still on you continue to avoid looking at Ortega during the whole ride back to the block where you live. Your cheeks are burning hot as it is. In return, he doesn’t stop looking at you, as if you might disappear from the cab seat next to him if he even blinked. When he helps you to get into the seat, you let him. When he slides to the place next to you, you let him. But when he tries to take your hands, you pull them away and wrap your arms around your torso under your coat and he lets you.

Ortega tries to start a conversation, but you cut him short, leaning forward to the cab driver to ask him to hurry up instead.

“Charge please, I can’t think straight at the moment. Let me rest, then we can talk.” You are barely whispering at that point and breathe a sigh of relief when he bites back whatever he is about to say and replies with an almost begging “Of course. But please text me if you need anything, alright?” before you get out of the cab to walk – no, hobble – the remaining distance from the side-walk to your tiny apartment. 

When you are finally sitting in your bathtub, you are so close to fainting that for a brief moment you consider getting back on his unspoken offer. But no, the risk would be too high. Too dangerous. Especially now that you are stripped naked to carefully wash away the crusted blood and debris, to see what can be patched up with a compress and some band aids and what would need the stapler. Lucky for you, the leg wound has finally stopped bleeding while you were in the cab. Unfortunately, you still have to clean it. Infection is the last thing you need right now. You clench your teeth and get to work. By now you’ve become quite the surgeon. It is messy work and your growing collection of scars surely isn’t pretty to look at, but your appearance is the last thing you’re thinking about until you’re done.

Then you lean back in the tub to rinse off the remaining sweat and blood and dirt with the shower head in your hand. You allow your mind to return to what happened. There’s no turning back now. You can’t undo this small slip-up. You can not make Ortega forget what you just did a few hours earlier and you realize that even if you could, you don’t want to.

With that thought, you pull yourself up to stiffly climb out of the tub. You make sure to rinse it properly so you don’t have to scrub away dried blood later, put on the pyjama pants and long sleeved shirt you wear at night and limp to your sleeping couch, downing some painkillers and iron supplements on the way. Whatever you’re going to do to solve this situation with Ortega will have to wait until later. You remember to send him a short Home. Doc says I'll be fine before you toss your phone to the floor. The last thing you need right now is him showing up here to make sure you haven’t bled to death or something. No, right now you need sleep more than anything else and you just hope for being too exhausted and having lost too much blood to have any dreams you can remember. Even though there’s the small hope that maybe, for once, the dreams might be pleasant.

 __________________ 

Judging from the light and noise coming through the shutters of your window, it must be past noon when you finally wake up. You are lucky that you really didn’t dream and it feels like the lingering migraine has been drowned out with the painkillers you swallowed yesterday. Still, when you rise into a sitting position, you feel a bit dizzy. You groan and blink into the small strip of sunlight that dances on the opposite wall until your head stops spinning. Then, the buzzing of your flip phone brings you back to the real world. You suppress another groan when you bend down sideways to pick it off the floor, where you left it yesterday. Of course. Ortega has tried to call you, once directly after you’ve sent your message, once around 10 am. The latest buzzing is from a text message though. Only two words. Dinner tonight?

You ponder the implications for a moment. Dinner with the Marshal is your usual way of celebrating another victory. Nothing special about it, really. Just two men enjoying some good food and drinks together to celebrate having made Los Diablos a little bit safer. Celebrating that they're still breathing. Except that, fucking hell, he’s kissed you and you have kissed him back and also he is currently dating this Riley, whom you haven’t bothered to meet yet but you still feel bad about if they found out about this kiss. 

Still, a part of you hopes that if you carry on as usual, the warm feeling in your stomach whenever your mind wanders to Ortega or his brown eyes or this damn smile of his or to this stupid stupid kiss will go away. You don’t want it to go away, but you are also so damn terrified of the consequences. 

The only thing you know is that you have to answer this text message or he would not stop pestering you or, even worse, show up here and there was no way of knowing what would happen then and you don’t dare to find out yet.

You sigh and flip open the phone again. The rumbling in your stomach finally helps you make a decision. 

OK HQ at 7:30?

The reply comes almost immediately and you can’t help but feel your cheeks burning again.This time, you allow the smile to creep up to your eyes.

#mutantenfisch writes #fhr #fallen hero #chargestep #fallen hero rebirth #ricardo ortega #oc: terry rhys #terry is a gay disaster who always assumes the worst #but deep down he is a marshmallow that just wants to be held #i said i didn't write the dinner and day after #but i need to tell you that they got chinese noodles and soup

[mariocki]

I was recently at an Oxfam bookshop, which is always a dangerous thing. I don't get to them often, but whenever I do I leave with far too much stuff. This time was no different, and I walked away with a bag full of books and records. Most exciting among my purchases, though, was a collected edition of the poems of William McGonagall.

I have long been after such a tome. For the uninitiated, McGonagall was a 19th century Scots poet and (by his own description) tragedian. This is him:

He is also often described as perhaps the worst poet who ever lived.

I've been a fan of McGonagall's work ever since I first came across The Famous Tay Whale, perhaps the best known of his poems. Like all of his work, it displays a total disregard for scansion; a rigid adherence to end-rhyme, no matter how strained; and a tendency toward utter literalism, forsaking metaphor or imagery in favour of simply describing what is in front of his eyes. An excerpt:

So the monster whale did sport and play

Among the innocent little fishes in the beautiful Tay,

Until he was seen by some men one day,

And they resolved to catch them without delay.

Taken by itself this might not seem so bad - it certainly isn't good - but McGonagall's poems all have a habit of going on slightly too long as well, so that he ultimately begins to repeat himself, and the more painful of the lines only get worse. I will say, though, that The Famous Tay Whale does contain perhaps my favourite of all McGonagall's stanzas:

Then the water did descend on the men in their boats,

Which wet their trousers and also their coats;

But it only made them the more determined to catch the whale,

But the whale shook at them his tail.

I mean, that's a triple whammy. You've got the horrible, awful lack of scanning between the third and fourth lines, the crazed reliance on rhyme, and the utterly extraneous detail of the wet coats. In a twisted way, this is art.

It feels sort of cruel to celebrate someone for being bad at something. But McGonagall really was very, very bad. Actually, there is some debate about whether or not he was 'in' on the joke - that he may have been a skilled music hall entertainer, who had created the character of The Great McGonagall in order to draw a crowd - and at the height of his fame, he was certainly very successful. There is enough oddness, however, and general eccentricity in his private life to convince me that McGonagall was entirely sincere in his belief of his artistic talents.

A greater reading of his work reveals some particular obsessions held by the poet. There are numerous poems dedicated to new buildings or elements of industry. The best known of these, I suppose, is the triptych of poems about the Tay Railway Bridge (the Tay itself figures in an alarming number of the poems). Some brief excerpts:

The Railway Bridge Of The Silvery Tay

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay!

And prosperity to Messrs Bouche and Grothe,

The famous engineers of the present day,

Who have succeeded in erecting the Railway

Bridge of the Silvery Tay,

Which stands unequalled to be seen

Near by Dundee and the Magdalen Green.

The singling out of individuals for praise towards the end of the poem is another recurring motif in McGonagall's work. A little over a year after writing the above poem, the Tay Rail Bridge collapsed during a storm, whilst a train was crossing. The disaster moved the poet to write again:

The Tay Bridge Disaster

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

Remember'd is a particularly frustrating word because the removal of that e does nothing to shorten the word or number of syllables when read aloud. Honestly, I can only assume McGonagall was doing it for the aesthetic. Regardless, when a replacement bridge was unveiled the poet once more put pen to paper:

An Address To The New Tay Bridge

Beautiful new railway bridge of the Silvery Tay,

With your strong brick piers and buttresses in so grand array,

And your thirteen central girders, which seem to my eye

Strong enough all windy storms to defy.

And as I gaze upon thee my heart feels gay,

Because thou are the greatest railway bridge of the present day,

And can be seen for miles away

As well as the Tay Rail Bridge, McGonagall captured numerous towns and cities with his pen; there are poems dedicated to Edinburgh, Glasgow, New York, Balmoral, Torquay, Perth, and several about his home town of Dundee. The poet also wrote on topical events, particularly disasters and battles (presumably where his title of Tragedian came from). Then there are addresses to particular people - to Queen Victoria, to Shakespeare, Tennyson, an unknown poet who poked fun at him, and to someone called J. Graham Henderson, presumably a tailor:

Lines In Praise Of Mr. J. Graham Henderson, Hawick

Success to Mr. J. Graham Henderson, who is a good man,

And to gainsay it there's few people can,

I say so from my own experience,

And experience is a great defence.

He is a good man, I venture to say,

Which I declare to the world without dismay,

Because he's given me a suit of Tweeds, magnificent to see,

So good that it cannot be surpassed in Dundee.

An excerpt from one of McGonagall's tragic tales:

The Disastrous Fire At Scarborough

Oh! It was horrible to see the flames leaping up all around,

While among the spectators the silence was profound,

As they saw a man climb out to the parapet high,

Resolved to save his life, or in the attempt to die!

And he gave one half frantic leap, with his heart full of woe,

And came down upon the roof of a public-house 20 feet below;

But, alas! He slipped and fell through the skylight,

And received cuts and bruises: oh, what a horrible sight!

It is lines such as the above that have undoubtedly caused people to question whether the writer was some kind of elaborate hoaxer; those are also the sort of lines that have won him diehard fans (J. K. Rowling and Terry Pratchett among them - both have made references to McGonagall in their work). Some have speculated that the poet may have been on the autism spectrum, and it's entirely possible. After writing to Queen Victoria to try and secure her patronage, and receiving an official rejection written by a royal functionary, McGonagall seems to have mistaken it for some form of validation from the Queen and would often describe her as an admirer of his work for the rest of her life.

It might seem cruel to draw attention to the work of an artist so clearly lacking in technical ability, but I am, like many others, genuinely fond of McGonagall and his work. A large part of the study of poetry is an attempt to get inside the mind, to understand the very soul of the poet. William McGonagall had a fascinating mind, and a unique soul.

I'll finish with a fragment, all that remains of an otherwise lost McGonagall poem, written to celebrate the unveiling of a statue of Robert Burns in Dundee in 1880:

The Burns Statue

This Statue, I must confess, is magnificent to see,

And I hope will long be appreciated by the people of Dundee;

It has been beautifully made by Sir John Steell,

And I hope the pangs of hunger he will never feel.

-

This statue is most elegant in its design,

And I hope will defy all weathers for a very long time;

And I hope strangers from afar with admiration will stare

On this beautiful statue of thee, Immortal Bard of Ayr.

-

Fellow-citizens, this Statue seems most beautiful to the eye,

Which would cause Kings and Queens for such a one to sigh,

And make them feel envious while passing by

In fear of not getting such a beautiful Statue after they die.

-

See where he sits on the stump of that tree

His eyes tuned to heaven his Mary to see,

A scroll at his feet, a pen in his hand

Writing to his Mary in the Better Land

#long post #William McGonagall #William Topaz McGonagall #poetry #Poets #Poems #Literature #Tay rail bridge disaster #queen victoria #Robert burns #Sorry about the long post #I don't know how to do read mores

[dukeofriven]

Hussie, Hitler, And Boy I’m Tired

I said earlier that I didn’t want to put on my hip waders and muck about in the Homestuck tags. *pulls off hip waders* I went anyways. I went even though I was feeling pretty good because I had a nice dinner and got to watch the New Years Bake-Off special. I went anyways, and I did it for you, my eight followers who aren’t pornbots. It turns out the Homestuck fandom of Tumblr is as scary and hyperbolic as ever, and has taken one lousy bit of badly written crap and extrapolated that backwards into ‘Homestuck has always been a racist anti-semetic pile of garbage and everything about it is terrible and Andrew Hussie needs to die.” I’m not paraphrasing, by the way. Someone out there is chanting ‘die Andrew Hussie die,’ because he had the gall to... clumsily dunk on Hitler like a fifteen year old trying to impress his English teacher with edgy comedy? This new stuff is too dumb to be offensive, especially in an era with, y’know, Hitler-praising alt-right Neo Nazis actually being mainstream media figures.  Hey Tumblr fandom? Can you... mm not chill, chill’s not the word I’m looking for what is it... oh yes. Can y’all fuck off for once?

Tumblr doesn’t deserve to enjoy things because it doesn’t know how to enjoy things responsibly. It lurches from adoration to hatred without pause, and as a writer it gives me nothing but an anxiety. I cannot produce anything imperfect, I cannot ever write crap because if I do then all my work will be tainted by it forever. On Tumblr you are always judged by your worst effort, which is a fucking god-awful standard for large media franchises of any kind. You know who one of the greatest, most thoughtful, socially-driven authors of the twentieth century was? Terry Pratchett. You know what’s kind of sexist and lazy and awful? The Colour of Magic. You know what’s weirdly colonialist and smug and all-around shit? Snuff! Neither of those shitty books invalidate the forty other Discworld novels. The existence of Anchorman’s bloviating nothingness doesn’t erase Will Ferrel’s warm and desperately human performance in Stranger Than Fiction. The Forced Kiss Equal Romance kiss in Blade Runner doesn’t erase the rest of the movie piercing question on the nature of what it means to be human. And on and on and on. Andrew Hussie’s sneeze-shart dogshit history rewrite that was so embarrassingly bad it got pulled from the internet didn’t erase Rose/Kanaya, or gay Dave, or Joey Claire tap-dancing her little heart out to try and defeat a monster. And even if Andrew Hussie does a JK Rowling and produces nothing but ill-thought-out crap from here until the day we all die in the great Disney Final Merger of 2023, it still won’t invalidate the good moments that made you happy. I mean if Andrew Hussie toddles out of retirement onto a talk show in a bathrobe to discuss his new revelations on the Puppetgrandmasters of Scion who all have worryingly Semetic names, I’m not going to be so naive as to pretend that his earlier media can be consumed in some kind of vacuum, that the future cannot affect the past. but I am saying that the good that happened in it - the things that affected you in positive ways - are not ethereal. It mattered to you then, and that’s okay. Tumblr’s hyperbolic responses seem to be rooted in embarrassment and self-flagellation. People seem so terrified by the thought that anyone might associate them as a fan of something - gasp - linked to controversy that they... well, they say shit like “die andrew hussie die.” Hey dude. Hey. You need to redirect that anger, my friend. There’s actual Neo-Nazis in the streets. On the TV. In the US government. I guess what I’m trying to say is... Woof. Okay. You know, to give Andrew Hussie partial credit here, its nice to see someone actually write Adolf Hitler the way he really was - a pant-shitting constantly whiny toddler of a human being who endlessly threw tantrums and got to where he was largely on the strength of other people’s bad decisions. Remember kids: the biggest myth Neo-Nazis have ever perpetrated is that Germany under Hitler was well-run, well-organized, and anything other than a collection of squabbling dysfunctional fiefdoms run by party hacks propped up by a bureaucracy and military too bound by inertia, ego, and cultural racism to do anything to stop a lunatic from ripping their country to shreds. That whole ‘trains running on time’ thing? It’s nonsense. Go study the conduct of the war once Germany had exhausted all its pre-war stockpiled resources and ran out of useful shit to loot, once it had to start relying on its leadership for the things that make wars winnable - supplies, reinforcements, fuel, winter clothing. Watch the way from 1942 onwards Germany stumbled from one disaster to the next, as Hitler fired more and more generals and drew more and more authority to himself and his fellow party cronies. Hitler should not be feared as a man of competence or skill - he was a buffoon, a clown of a human being fuelled entirely by petty, vindictive spite and an unlimited capacity for cruelty. And before anyone goes ‘well if he was so objectively pathetic how the fuck did he take over Germany’ I direct you to google the last two years of American politics and the words ‘Donald Fucking Trump.’ [I recommend, on these war subjects particularly, Sir Antony Beevor’s bleak and sobering works, particularly Stalingrad, Berlin: The Downfall 1945, and Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble.]  Sorry this... kind of got away from me somewhat, but I really hate it when people get mad that someone didn’t take Hitler seriously (and, to be strictly fair, this is not what everyone is mad about in regards to Andrew Hussie, either). You should never take Hitler seriously. Take hate seriously - take violent words, and calls for purity, take his ideas of superiority and racial preeminence and anti-semitism seriously as the evils, the horrors as they are. But the man himself? He literally stank - a combination of his halitosis, chronic flatulence, and was constant diarrhea. [I am not exaggerating] He was a sad pathetic clown, and Andrew Hussie chose to write him as such. He just... went too far. It happens. It’s not good writing. It’s fucking shit, to be honest. Boring shit. The Minions movie decided to have the Minions sit out the entirety of WWII by having them get stuck in a cave or some such. Honestly that’s a better option than what Andrew Hussie went with - and ‘be more like the Minions movie’ isn’t advice I give that often. You want to be disgruntled that an author wrote something this bafflingly tone deaf and tedious? Sure. I know I am. But to chant for his death? Are you fucking kidding me? Look! Look out your window at those marching Neo-Nazis trying to establish a white supremacist state? What the ever-loving fuck are you people doing in here getting ready to string-up a man whose crime was making Adolf Friggen Hitler too petty???????? Tumblr. Tumblr, for the love of god this has to stop. This ‘Ceasar’s wife must be above reproach’ shit has to stop - it’s killing fandom, it’s killing good media critique, it’s burying proportional fan response, and its just exhausting. Why can’t you ever just let something be lousy without it being literal death warrant? There’s real demons out there - I can see them out the window, and every time I turn on the TV. Maybe - just bloody maybe - not every single crime deserves the exact same level of disapprobation and punishment? Maybe we could read some content and say “boy that sure had some lousy implications and also was just really poorly written” and then... stop there? Wouldn’t that be nice, for a change? We could dislike something without feeling like it required activism on our part. We could say ‘this piece of media was shit, but it didn’t advocate for a white ethno-state, so I will continue to think of it only until the end of this sentence.’ I am not advocating for an end to media criticism for anything that isn’t openly hate speech (but if you think that I am I am going to assume you’re already so needlessly enraged about this whole matter that I’m a bit puzzled why you’ve bothered to read this far since its obvious we don’t agree on many fundamental issues.) What I am calling for is the end to death threats against people who don’t mean you harm. Because that’s lunacy. That’s beyond the pale, actually, that’s really disturbing and sickening and you should seriously reconsider your relationship with media. Because there are people out there who do want to hurt you. Their lives are fuelled by hate, their philosophies are driven by it, as are their politics. I assure you that when a time traveller steps through a portal trying to prevent the rise of ‘the great Trump War of 2020′ the inciting incident will not be ‘Andrew Hussie trivialized the holocaust by citing its origins as a grudge Adolf Hitler bore Albert Einstein over a rivalry in secret clown ninja school before being taken on as an agent of a baking-obsessed alien space witch and bumped into power by the Peters principle.’ Because just by writing that sentence I have already reaffirmed a very simple truth: this is way, way too stupid to give the slightest shit about. So let’s tell Andrew Hussie that his new work is... mmm.... kind of like a shit if a shit had a shit that was itself shat out by a shit and then vomited on by another shit who had eaten nothing but shit since Sunday. Let’s tel lhim “hey dude, your clownish work summoned the spectre of anti-semetism, and you can do better.” Frankly, I think that message was already sent, since in the two hours between me going to make and eat dinner and then coming back to my computer, the new material was discovered, read, disseminated, and removed. Two hours. Sure, maybe a bit of lag due to what does and does not hit my feed but come on - this all took place in an afternoon. It’s already down. Our voices were heard - we didn’t think this was very good, and apparently Whatpumpkin agrees enough that they didn’t mount a defence of it. Rather than take the next logical step, though - which seems to be calling for the death of Andrew Hussie and removing all of Homestuck from the internet and maybe nuking Toby Fox from orbit just to be extra-sure? - we could do... something else. Talk about the release date for Stranger Things, maybe. Track down some local Neo-Nazis and punch them. Read some Antony Beevor books and really educate ourselves on what a smelly fuck-up Hitler was so we can chant that at Neo Nazis at their next rally. Or you could watch the New Years Bake-Off special. It was pretty good.

#homestuck #andrew hussie #hitler #hiveswap #hiveswap friendsim #whatpumpkin #skaianet #bake-off #terry pratchett #homestuck analysis

[antiquery]

multiples of six

6. What would you like to have in 2018 that you lacked in 2017?

cold weather where i live, i HATE the heat. (although it’s 26 fahrenheit outside in san antonio right now, so i probably shouldn’t complain).

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

my incredible girlfriend, who kept me sane through the madness of the college application process, nearly failing ap physics, and a lot of complicated family stuff i had to deal with this year. i don’t deserve luca, and without them this year would have been exponentially worse, just on a “how much of a disaster am i” front.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

i do wish my junior year had gone better academically— not for the sake of college admissions, obviously, but because i was taking a lot of classes that really interested me and for various reasons i didn’t do all that well in some of them. part of that was turmoil in my personal life, but part of it was also just my prioritizing other things above academics, which in hindsight i shouldn’t have done.

24. What was the best book you read?

objective best, probably r&g are dead, or the truth by terry pratchett. subjective best, i really enjoyed heart of darkness and lovecraft’s dream cycle.

30. What one thing made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

this is going to be incredibly petty, sorry in advance. so there’s this guy at my school, let’s call him andy. andy is pretty much your average white boy nerd in all the worst ways. he thinks he’s brilliant, despite all evidence to the contrary, and constantly talks down to any woman who tries to engage in conversation with him, including me, because i know people who are friends with him and he’s somewhat unavoidable. he’s a patronizing misogynistic asshole who once tried to explain to me why gay people are genetically inferior. he’s a textbook example of dunning-kruger.

anyway, andy’s always wanted to go to mit, and he’s always been convinced that he’ll get in, despite the fact that he’s in the bottom half of the class and his test scores are abjectly terrible, totally noncompetitive for a school like that. this year it’s finally sunk in that he has no chance of acceptance, so he’s reverted to “i never wanted to go for undergrad in the first place” and decided on the lesser of texas’s two state flagships, assuming he’s a shoo-in there (he’s really not).

well, the college i’m going to offers its women full cross-registration privileges with mit, funnily enough. so at rodrigo’s encouraging, i went up to andy the other day and asked him, innocently enough, “so you want to go to mit for grad school, right?”

“yeah,” he said, unsuspecting.

i smiled brightly. “well, i’ll scope it out for you! you know, since wellesley students can take classes there.”

oh, gentle reader, i wish i had the words to describe the look in his eyes at that moment. i don’t, but i will treasure it in my mind forever. i will never forget how good it felt to beat this fucking...this entitled douchebag, this guy who had talked down to me for years, who had tried just the other day to mansplain the middle ages to me, this absolute sack of shit, into the emotional ground with my accomplishments. there is NOTHING more satisfying. jesus h christ. 

36. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2017.

related to the above: success is the best revenge there is.

#mayleavestars #q&a