not to be obnoxious. but i really like the jily in choices. and now you're thinking, bitch i should hope so, you wrote it. WHICH, yeah, fair point. but, it's super overwhelming to receive a lot of negative feedback on something, especially when that negative feedback is like "you're a morally corrupt person writing horribly morally corrupt characters blah blah blah die" y'know? so like, there are a lot of parts of that story that, in my head, have been a bit warped, by having people repeatedly tell me how awful they are. but sometimes i'll read bits of it and im like "wait. no. this is actually good (grammar mistakes aside - im sorry, i know it's bad, i had school and work and my brain was clearly mush or something idk)." like. chapter 55 jily. i just love it. i love when lily tells james he's putting on an act in therapy. i love when she tells him that now, when she looks back, all these memories she thought were about them, have regulus's fingerprints all over them. and he tells her he thinks regulus felt the same way and that he's sorry. because he never wanted either of them to feel like they meant less than everything to him. because they never meant less than everything. i like when she tells james that regulus wasn't a good person. and when james says "i know. but he wanted to be, and doesn't that matter?" and lily thinks it probably doesn't but regulus is dead and so she lets him have that. LIKE i just. yeah it's fucking messy. and it will never not be messy. nothing about their relationship will ever be simple. but i love that. like i love that so much. and i've had people tell me they think it was a copout, having james love them both. but i just, i disagree. james being torn apart by how much he loves people. like that's it. that's the story i want to tell. that's the character i want to write. ANYWAY. there's not really a point to this other than like, sometimes i forget that i really like choices a lot. that i wrote it for myself and i wrote the characters and the relationships that i wanted. and that it isn't some horrible ugly terrible thing that should be hidden from innocent eyes and like, stuffed in a cannon and fired into the sun, y'knowwwww?????
Hello, a little rant here. I don't know whether people are becoming insensitive or I'm just taking things very seriously these times, but I beg of you, when I post about an update on the situation in Gaza, or about a lost life or any piece of news that is most likely horrifying and heartbreaking, do not repost or reblog with "yikes" or "real bullshit" or whatever goes in the same line. It just makes it seem so trivial when in fact it's world-shattering. Not to mention the horrible edits I see on Instagram/tiktok.
I literally came across an "Instagram reel" of my friend's UNCLE (who lost three of his kids, and was saying his goodbyes while they were in body bags), it was edited into a reel, with the effects and changing colors and the trending sound of the song "daylight by David kushner". I was speechless.
I know people show their solidarity differently, I know this. Especially through music, I've literally been listening to Samer songs as well as "Telk Qadieah", etc. But the edit I saw was way too much. I don't know how to explain it, because I've seen many reels of Palestinians in Gaza grieving and I thought it's important to share them but this one is different. It was like the edits you'd make for characters from a TV show or movie that died or had a sad storyline.
I don't know, maybe I'm overreacting but I genuinely feel like I'm going crazy. With everything going on and how it seems like some people are living in a parallel world rn.
I hope I don't get misunderstood, I'm not talking about the general clips with sometimes sad songs on them, I'm talking about certain edits the people started to make that are so weird and insensitive. Like the people they're editing aren't real, like they're some entertainment material.
crows use tools and like to slide down snowy hills. today we saw a goose with a hurt foot who was kept safe by his flock - before taking off, they waited for him to catch up. there are colors only butterflies see. reindeer are matriarchical. cows have best friends and 4 stomachs and like jazz music. i watched a video recently of an octopus making himself a door out of a coconut shell.
i am a little soft, okay. but sometimes i can't talk either. the world is like fractal light to me, and passes through my skin in tendrils. i feel certain small things like a catapult; i skirt around the big things and somehow arrive in crisis without ever realizing i'm in pain.
in 5th grade we read The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-time, which is about a young autistic boy. it is how they introduced us to empathy about neurotypes, which was well-timed: around 10 years old was when i started having my life fully ruined by symptoms. people started noticing.
i wonder if birds can tell if another bird is odd. like the phrase odd duck. i have to believe that all odd ducks are still very much loved by the other normal ducks. i have to believe that, or i will cry.
i remember my 5th grade teacher holding the curious incident up, dazzled by the language written by someone who is neurotypical. my teacher said: "sometimes i want to cut open their mind to know exactly how autistics are thinking. it's just so different! they must see the world so strangely!" later, at 22, in my education classes, we were taught to say a person with autism or a person on the spectrum or neurodivergent. i actually personally kind of like person-first language - it implies the other person is trying to protect me from myself. i know they had to teach themselves that pattern of speech, is all, and it shows they're at least trying. and i was a person first, even if i wasn't good at it.
plants learn information. they must encode data somehow, but where would they store it? when you cut open a sapling, you cannot find the how they think - if they "think" at all. they learn, but do not think. i want to paint that process - i think it would be mostly purple and blue.
the book was not about me, it was about a young boy. his life was patterned into a different set of categories. he did not cry about the tag on his shirt. i remember reading it and saying to myself: i am wrong, and broken, but it isn't in this way. something else is wrong with me instead. later, in that same person-first education class, my teacher would bring up the curious incident and mention that it is now widely panned as being inaccurate and stereotypical. she frowned and said we might not know how a person with autism thinks, but it is unlikely to be expressed in that way. this book was written with the best intentions by a special-ed teacher, but there's some debate as to if somebody who was on the spectrum would be even able to write something like this.
we might not understand it, but crows and ravens have developed their own language. this is also true of whales, dolphins, and many other species. i do not know how a crow thinks, but we do know they can problem solve. (is "thinking" equal to "problem solving"? or is "thinking" data processing? data management?) i do not know how my dog thinks, either, but we "talk" all the same - i know what he is asking for, even if he only asks once.
i am not a dolphin or reindeer or a dog in the nighttime, but i am an odd duck. in the ugly duckling, she grows up and comes home and is beautiful and finds her soulmate. all that ugliness she experienced lives in downy feathers inside of her, staining everything a muted grey. she is beautiful eventually, though, so she is loved. they do not want to cut her open to see how she thinks.
a while ago i got into an argument with a classmate about that weird sia music video about autism. my classmate said she thought it was good to raise awareness. i told her they should have just hired someone else to do it. she said it's not fair to an autistic person to expect them to be able to handle that kind of a thing.
today i saw a goose, and he was limping. i want to be loved like a flock loves a wounded creature: the phrase taken under a wing. which is to say i have always known i am not normal. desperate, mewling - i want to be loved beyond words.
I think Aventurine would be too afraid to ask you out directly, so instead he would get you to play a game with him. Can be poker, a coin flip--anything really. The only rule is that the loser has to do anything the winner wants.
Of course, Aventurine wins, and with a smug grin tells you to accompany him for the rest of the day. He asks the right questions to sneakily deduce where you would want to go if given the opportunity (aquarium, museum, the movies, etc) and takes you there under the guise of being curious what's so special about that place.
He splurges to dress you up in fancy clothes, pays for all your meals, and buys you anything that catches your eye. No expense is too big when it comes to pampering you, but he'll laugh it off as him trying to get on your good side with some bribing.
It is a date in all but name, but he'll never admit it is one.
Aventurine gives everything and asks for nothing in return, only jokingly teasing you about giving him a kiss in exchange. In reality, he doesn't expect anything as he doesn't want to force you.
Yet, if you give him that kiss he secretly yearns for, perhaps you can make him confess that there is more to this encounter than just fulfilling a bet. Perhaps you can catch a glimpse of the feelings he tries his best to hide when you're around, find a crack in that smug facade of his.