#the private elementary schools i taught in the parents thought we were doing a great job pedagogically and we were Not as i came to realize

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

nightmarish (and probably racist) private school parents contributed significantly to the nightmare year that ultimately killed my willingness to continue with classroom teaching (aka the dream of my entire adulthood to that point) for good, and also several of them drove close personal friends of mine completely bugfuck crazy, so, like, i'm really not emotionally invested in defending private school parents as a demographic. but i do find that a lot of discourse around the motivations of private school parents in choosing private school feel to me misguided and more interested in moralistic grandstanding than in accuracy (on the INTERNET? crazy, i know). and i am saying this now and thinking about it now because the number of these things i had to deal with in high school was: zero!

#i mean there were other things about my high school experience i didn't realize were fucked up until i was an adult #and my high school experience definitely contributed to the Problems of me and several people i know #but. i dunno. #i think that people tend to assume private schools are basically the same as public schools but with like #different (whiter/richer) student demographics #and maybe more APs or whatever #that is really not true to my experience as someone who has spent a lot of time in both #(also residential segregation is so intense i think even the demographic question is more complicated than people assume) #(the whitest school i attended in my life was the westchester public school where i spent first and second grade) #(diversity in that classroom was like. me a japanese girl and a kid whose dad tried to keep his jewishness on the DL) #also i used to think private schools should be illegal so that rich parents would have to invest in the public school system #but i am no longer convinced that would make a difference partly bc segregation and partly bc like #parents also don't know what makes schools good #the private elementary schools i taught in the parents thought we were doing a great job pedagogically and we were Not as i came to realize

[eggtoasties]

Chapter One: I. Allegro

Pairing: Kuroo Tetsuro x Reader

Rating: G

Word Count: 3.2k

Summary: Kuroo used to think the best sound in the world was a volleyball hitting the court on the other side of the net. Now, he has other things on his repertoire.

Counter point: Good counterpoint requires two qualities: (1) a meaningful or harmonious relationship between the lines (a “vertical” consideration—i.e., dealing with harmony) and (2) some degree of independence or individuality within the lines themselves (a “horizontal” consideration, dealing with melody).

It was illogical really, Kuroo thought to himself, having to take a mandatory arts class. He was an athlete. He would probably major in STEM or business the next year if he didn’t go pro. But here he was, staring at the course catalogue, deciding between different bands, choirs, art classes, and orchestra. Irritatingly, Kenma had finished his arts requirement last year, taking a video editing class which Kuroo thought was definitely cheating since he figured Kenma already knew the basics. Plus, he not-so-secretly believed that Kenma would benefit from another non-electronic hobby.

Sighing, he assessed each class. He knew he was tone deaf and did not want others listening to him sing. Plus, he’s seen the red cummerbunds and bow ties the choir had to wear for concerts and refused to give his teammates the blackmail fodder even if Yaku thought it looked “refined.”

To be honest, Kuroo didn’t know much about the arts. He only had the vaguest understanding of the differences between Watercolor 101, Figure drawing 101, and Oil Painting 101. While he thought of himself in the studio, palette in hand with an apron tied around him, working intently at the easel on the next generational masterpiece, he remembered when Kenma threw his pencil-drawn mockups of promotional posters in the trash and told him not to show the rest of the team.

While maybe he could try digital media, he couldn’t help but imagine himself against the romanticized backdrop of more traditional arts.

He had to choose between the several band electives and orchestra. He couldn’t do marching band—he wouldn’t be caught dead in those uniforms, wind ensemble had auditions he surely wouldn’t pass, jazz band had mandatory solos, but symphonic band was for rookies. ‘Beginners welcome,’ was typed out with an asterisk under the listing. But, so did orchestra. Doing a quick search to figure out the difference between band and orchestra, Kuroo weighed his options.

He took piano lessons from ages four through ten before finally convincing his parents to let him quit—wearing them down by crying every week and throwing a mini tantrum at daily practice—not that he intentionally did it as an elementary school student. But, even from an early age, he knew volleyball was it for him.

While he wasn’t well acquainted with classical music, he had grown up with it from his parents. Well, when they were irritated with the bickering matches between him and his older sister, their parents would crank up the car radio, drowning their yelling. His mom would tell him she used to play Mozart for him when he was a baby which is why he grew so tall—which he would always say makes no sense—and occasionally, a film score would make the hairs on his arms rise even when he was trying to focus on the scene.

So he decided. He’d enroll in orchestra for the year, make himself unnoticeable in the back, and fulfill his arts requirement so he could graduate high school and maybe apply to university. Plus, he figured, as he ticked the box next to orchestra, he’d finally be able to wear his suit his parents bought him, saying that he’d need it eventually.

Folding the course registration paper and sliding it into an envelope to be sent to Nekoma High, he stood up from his seat at the low dining room table and decided to go to Kenma’s, figuring they could squeeze some volleyball practice before summer vacation ended.

.

The first day of his third year was unextraordinary. He woke up tired, coaxed his bed head into something manageable, and started his commute to school, picking Kenma up on the way. Double and triple checking his course schedule on his phone and reminding his teammates that they all had to help out in advertising the volleyball club—well, maybe except Yaku—he tapped his toes with a mix of nervousness and anticipation.

His classes were nothing special, most of them a continuation of the year before or courses he carefully picked with the advice of his seniors. But, walking towards the orchestra room at the far side of the building where all the music classes were, he felt a familiar rush of nervous adrenaline spike—not unlike the nerves before a big match. But this time, he couldn’t be confident in his own skills or rely on a team to back him up. Counting the room numbers until it matched the one on his registration, he found the room with its double doors propped open.

Striding in, the large open space was in various states of organized chaos. Other students were already moving chairs in uniform columns, two to a row, and were pulling instruments out of cases. Unsure of what to do, he immediately found the teacher.

“Hi Jouda-sensei, I’m Kuroo Tetsuro,” he introduced. “I’m new—where should I sit?”

“Hi Tetsuro-kun, it’s nice to meet you,” she said warmly. “Ah, yes I see you enrolled as a beginner.” Flipping through the pages on her clipboard she hummed, “Is there a particular instrument you’d like to play?” sweeping a hand across the room. “We could always use more violas, we have enough cellos, weirdly too many basses, but we could also stick you with the second violins?”

Kuroo didn’t quite know the difference between violas and violins but figured ‘second’ violins implied that there was also a ‘first’ violins group and that he’d be more likely to be able to hide in the back in a bigger group.

“Yeah,” he drawled out confidently, “I actually wanted to learn violin.”

“Okay, perfect. Here—” she motioned another student over. “Tetsuro-kun, meet Daisuke-kun.” Daisuke greeted Kuroo with a shallow bow and Kuroo responded with a head nod, mentally rolling his eyes at Daisuke’s subtle disapproval.

“He’s first chair of the second violins,” Jouda-sensei continued, “he’ll get you set up. Daisuke-kun, have him take one of the rentals and teach him the ropes. Today’s mostly getting people set up if they don’t have their own instruments and playing through potential setlists,” she explained while twirling her pen in her right hand. “Testsuro-kun, you’re our only new violin which means everyone can help you learn—take today to be comfortable with an instrument in your hands and observe your classmates!” she finished, walking away.

“I’m Sato Daisuke, a second year,” Daisuke reintroduced, emphasizing his year.

“Kuroo Tetsuro, third year,” he said smugly.

“Ah—okay,” Daisuke said standing straighter, “Kuroo-san, follow me,” turning towards the back of the room.

Chuckling Kuroo said, “Just Kuroo’s fine—you’re technically my senior here since I’ve never played violin before.”

Stuttering a bit and covering it with a cough, Daisuke nodded once. He stood in front of a wall of neatly labelled cubbies and pulling a black rectangular case out, he handed it to Kuroo. Explaining the rules of the rental and making him sign a form, Daisuke taught Kuroo how to properly tighten the bow, use rosin, clean the instrument, and taught him simple exercises to practice posture.

Fiddling a bit with the shoulder rest as Daisuke excused himself for a second, Kuroo ran through the exercises to get himself acquainted with the feel of the violin under his chin and a bow in his right hand. It was uncomfortable, he noted. His left shoulder wanted to scrunch up towards his face, his left wrist wanted to press towards the neck of the violin, and he couldn’t comfortably hold his bow. For the first time in a while, Kuroo felt out of his element—he felt as though his body couldn’t do what he wanted it to do. He felt awkward and unsure and the back of his neck prickled as he caught other students look his way.

Finally, Daisuke came back. Holding a thin blue book in his hand he explained, “This’ll teach you the basics of reading music. The thickest string on the left is G, followed by D, A, and E. Notes go in order of A through G and it just repeats.” Making sure Kuroo was following along, he continued. “So, If we start on the G string and put a finger down,” he moved over to place Kuroo’s index finger on the first tape, “what note is this?”

“A?”

“Yup, great. Follow the tapes for where you should put your fingers, I taught you how to tune and you need to study and practice every night so you’ll be able to partially follow along in class.”

Head a little dizzy with the new information but also proud to have understood some of the basics, Kuroo nodded. Daisuke took Kuroo to the back of the group, explained to a student who Kuroo was, then took his place towards the front.

Kuroo’s stand partner was a first year—Hayato. He’d been doing orchestra since middle school, didn’t take private lessons like many of the other students, but enjoyed orchestra enough to continue in high school as a hobby. Although a little awkward, Hayato was patient when giving Kuroo a more detailed explanation of reading music, since six years of piano lessons had completely left him, and set him up with basic exercises.

“You need to make sure your left wrist is down and relaxed,” Hayato said, tapping a pencil to Kuroo’s inner wrist. “Also, your bow grip is atrocious, but that’s one of the hardest things for a beginner.” He showed Kuroo how the bow was supposed to be held, stressing how it should look relaxed and curved.

Making small adjustments while Kuroo shakily moved the bow across the strings, Hayato said, “Sensei will probably have you come during study hall to practice, but you need to practice at home too or Sato-san and the concertmaster will probably chew you out.”

Bow stuttering crookedly across the strings, making Sato tut at him, Kuroo paused. “The concertmaster,” he asked disbelievingly. “What is that?” imagining some despotic conductor in long tuxedo trails and a clipboard.

Laughing at his confusion, Hayato explained. “The concertmaster is the first chair violinist. In orchestra they’re like the leader of the group. They tune the group, come out second to last before the conductor during concerts, make decisions on bowings, and everyone kinda follows their lead.”

Nodding to himself Kuroo said, “Okay, so he’s like,” he trailed off, “the captain of the team?”

“Exactly. Except she’s a third year like you and pretty well known in the music scene in our area, y’know.”

Frowning at his assumption he admitted, “Ah, okay so,” he trailed off, “concertmistress? I play volleyball, I don’t really know music.”

Hayato laughed and Kuroo raised a brow. “I mean obviously—you don’t really look like a violinist.”

Affronted Kuroo said, “Oi, what does that mean?”

“Kuroo-san, you’re like, huge,” Hayato squeaked out.

Trying not to preen, Kuroo waved his hand and turned his head towards the front of the class.

Jouda-sensei stood on her podium and tapped her baton on the raised stand in front of her. “Hi everyone, good to see all of you again. We have a few new faces so make sure to welcome them and help them out. I’m super excited for our potential set list this year, but before I pass out the folders, let’s a hear a few words from our concertmistress!”

With scattered applause and stomping, a girl rose to the podium as Jouda-sensei stepped off. Holding her violin and bow in her left hand she beamed at the class. Briefly introducing herself and sharing her excitement for the year to make music with everyone, Jouda-sensei interrupted her return to her seat.

“For the first rehearsal, how about you formally tune us?” Jouda-sensei offered.

“Aw, no it’s okay—some people are beginners and all the section leaders already took care of it right?”

Next to her, her stand partner threw an eraser at the podium making her scowl. “Just do it, her stand partner complained,” drawing laughter from the class.

Giving her partner the finger, hidden from their sensei’s view, she laughed good naturedly and straightened her shoulders.

All of a sudden, Kuroo noted, the atmosphere in the room changed. Students were no longer whispering to each other, playing random tunes, or shuffling in their seats. Everyone’s eyes were on her at the podium. She offered an open palm and nodded towards the back of the room. A single note penetrated the silence.

She swept her hand towards the back and Kuroo was suddenly flooded with the sound of the deep and rich brass section. After a few seconds, she repeated the process and the woodwind instruments close to Kuroo in the back began to tune.

Hayato leaned towards Kuroo. “Before concerts and rehearsals everyone should’ve tuned beforehand. This more for last minute checks and also a show for the audience. The order and how many sections tune at once is usually decided between the concertmaster and the conductor—Kuroo-san, we’ll tune last.”

Nodding in appreciation, Kuroo turned his attention back to the podium. The woodwinds trailed off and after a beat of silence, she nodded once again for the tuning note to be played and she waved her hand towards the cellos and basses at her right. The gravelly resonance of the strings filled Kuroo with a strange sense of full contentment and marveled at the size of the basses, whose strings seemed to be quadruple the thickness of his own.

Finally, the concertmaster gave one last nod and tucked her violin under her chin. Hearing the drone of the pitch, everyone around Kuroo began to tune. Unsure of what to do, he stumbled to mimic Hayato who was adjusting his tuners. Since Sato Daisuke already tuned his instrument, Kuroo just played open strings and waited for the rest of his section to stop. Glancing to his left at Kuroo’s right hand, Hayato whispered sharply, “Keep your pinky curved!”

.

After tuning, folders were passed out to each student, filed with sheet music. Hayato organized the sheets on their stand.

“Since you’re on the inside—the left hand side of the stand—your job is to turn my pages,” he explained. “It’ll be good practice to see if you can follow along even if you can’t read, but no worries if you want to spend today just watching and listening.”

Thanking Hayato and teasing when he fumbled in embarrassment, Kuroo spent the rest of class in awe. Although the group was seeing the pieces for the first time, he couldn’t help the goosebumps on his arms as the orchestra came together. Even when he heard Hayato miss a note, noticed when the conductor would glare at a section, or when they had to stop and regroup, listening to individual instruments try come together as one left Kuroo wanting to be a part of it. From the inside, he watched as bows moved in unison and fingers slid up and down the necks of stringed instruments. He was hyper aware of the instruments behind him providing support to the main melody, and leaned towards them to catch their individual parts.

He set his gaze towards the front of the room and watched the concertmaster. Powerful yet graceful, her bow made sure movements across the strings, fingers moving quickly and accurately. Her body swayed with the music and her face, unlike Hayato’s, was not one of extreme concentration. She seemed focused as she watched the conductor and indicated entrances to her section through her body, but despite the multi-tasking, it was clear to Kuroo that she was having fun.

She trusted her section to follow along, for her stand partner to flip the pages at the right times, and for the rest of the orchestra to do their parts. When Jouda-sensei made the class begin again, she would lean towards her stand partner and share whispered giggles and Kuroo caught the glint of shiny pink polish and traced the way her hair fell across her shoulders.

He knew what being a captain was like—he had been captain since he was voted in at the end of his second year and he wondered how long she’d been playing for, how much she practices, and how she encourages her section. He wondered what the differences and similarities were between leading a team and an orchestra were—the differences and similarities between them, even.

At the end of class Kuroo promised to himself to practice a little every day to be able to play with the group and hold his own. For the rest of the school day, he idly hummed the melodies they had played in class and replayed images of bows and hands moving in unison.

.

In the club room before practice, Kuroo came in with his violin case. Greeting his teammates, he started to change.

Loosening his tie and pulling his sweater over his head, Kuroo heard Lev ask about his case. Swapping his school top for his practice one, Kenma responded.

“Kuroo’s taking orchestra for his arts credit.”

“Why would you take a band credit, you should’ve taken sculpture like I did,” Yamamoto exclaimed proudly.

“Your sculptures were ugly,” Kenma said evenly, over the sounds of his video game.

Before Yamamoto could respond, Fukunaga menacingly shook his water bottle at the two of them causing Kenma to turn his back and hunch defensively over his game.

Narrowing his eyes at Kenma, Yamamoto turned his attention back to Kuroo who was idly flipping through the practice book Daisuke had given him.

“Yeah Kuroo, band classes are so much work when you’ve gotta learn the instrument, why’d you enroll?”

Before Kuroo could respond Yaku jumped to Yamamoto’s side and jabbed him. “Band and orchestra are two different things you uncultured swine!”

Doubled over and grasping his stomach, Yamamoto glared tearfully at his senior, then directed his glare towards Lev who was slapping his knee in laughter.

“Kuroo-san,” Lev shouted, “can you play us something?” he asked excitedly.

Gaining the interest of the rest of the team, everyone crowded around Kuroo, nodding in unison. He rubbed the back of his head in uncertainty.

“I’ve literally just learned how to play. I don’t know if you’d really want me to.”

“We really want you to!” Lev said, encouraging him to open his case.

Begrudgingly, Kuroo went to his violin and briefly explained how to setup and tune, to the amazement of some of his teammates. Even Kenma peered curiously over his video game in the corner. He tucked the instrument under his chin, carefully held his bow and placed the hair on the A string and played. Kuroo focused intently on ensuring that his bow grip was loose, but secure, that his pinky and thumb were curved and that his bow was making straight lines across the string.

As Kuroo looked over to his teammates, he noticed Yaku’s shoulders starting to shake while he pointed a finger at him.

“I-Is that the best you can do?” Yaku nearly screamed, howling in laughter. “You’re not even moving your f-fingers!”

To Kuroo’s embarrassment, the rest of the team tried desperately to hold in their laughter and Lev deadpanned, “That kinda sucked, senpai.”

Stuttering out an indignant scoff, Kuroo’s brow furrowed, “I told you I just learned this today! A-and posture is important you heathens!” shaking his bow at Lev and Yaku.

#kuroo tetsuro #kuroo tetsuro drabble #kuroo tetsuro oneshot #kuroo tetsuro x you #kuroo tetsuro x reader #kuroo tetsurou #kuroo tetsuro scenarios #kuroo x reader #kuroo x you #haikyu x reader #haikyuu x reader #haikyu x you #haikyu x y/n #haikyuu x you #haikyuu x y/n #nekoma high #nekoma haikyuu #kuroo tetsuro fanfiction #kuroo x y/n

[jiminthestreets-bonesinthesheets]

I Loved Him... Once - CH 3

Title: I Loved Him… Once

Author: jiminthestreets-bonesinthesheets

Fandom: Criminal Minds

Pairing: Heid (Aaron Hotchner x Spencer Reid)

Rating: This ones General but eventually as the series goes it will be Explicit

Tags: canon typical violence and gore, eventual smut as the series goes, angst, fluff, pining., its gunna be a slow burn guys.

Summary: A series following the team as they solve crimes and take down the bad guys.

     In Part one of this series, we follow the team as they take down a serial killer that has taken a piece of one of their own. And through it all, Spencer and Hotch come to a few conclusions and realizations of their own.

AO3 

Masterlist 

*** My works are not to be posted on any sites without my permission! But comments and reblogs are love! <3 Please and thanks!!

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

Chapter three

     Spencer pulled into the bureau parking lot later the next day. Once he parked, he rested his head on the steering wheel for a few moments, wallowing in what he could have almost had but didn’t get the chance to even ask for, before letting it go and putting himself back into work mode. 

     He got out, grabbed his bag, and quickly made his way inside. And as soon as his feet hit the bullpen floor, JJ was there ushering everyone who had already arrived into the conference room.

     “Spence, hey! How was your holiday?” She asked as ash approached him and they walked towards the stairs together.

     “It was… okay.” He answered, shoving his hands in his pockets and matching her strides, “How was yours? Did Henry have fun camping?”

     “Oh yeah! He had loads of fun and way too many smores,” they both laughed, and Spencer had a feeling the smores had more to do with Will then JJ, “all though it was a much shorter vacation then I was hoping for, but I kind of expected as much. So what did you do with your six days?”

     “Uh…” Went to a lecture series, zoned out during said lecture series, thought about Aaron, had a small breakdown in the middle of the lecture series because of Aaron, was seconds away from asking Aaron out on a date right before they got called back… “Not much really, just… a couple lectures, nothing too fun.”

     “I'm sure it was still fun, you love stuff like that.”

     Great, Spencer thought, another person who thought he wasn't any fun. Maybe it was better he didn't get the chance to ask Aaron out. He might have thought going out with Spencer wouldn't be a good time, that he'd think a ‘fun night out’ included some form of education rather than something romantic. As if he needed yet another person to tell him he was boring, and this time it would be followed up by a harsh rejection he wasn't sure he'd be able to take.

     But he just nodded with a smile at JJ as they ascended the stairs and made it to the conference room door. “Well, vacation is officially over and now it's back to work,” then she opened the door and walked in, Spencer following after her.

     JJ walked in and sat on the other side of the table beside Emily, the two of them instantly opening the case files in front of them and quietly discussing between themselves, while they waited for everyone else. Derek was sitting beside Emily, case file open before him but seemingly stuck in his own little world, eyes glued to the page but not really looking. Garcia was up and walking around the table, distributing the last of the case files frantically, and it looked like Dave was the only one still missing. 

     So that left three free chairs at the table. One beside JJ which he assumed had already been claimed by Garcia, one beside Derek and the last… beside Aaron. He figured it would probably be in his best interest to sneak in and take the open seat beside Derek, so that's exactly what he tried to do. Tried. 

     As soon as he walked into the room and attempted to make the turn in Derek’s direction, he was stopped clean in his tracks when suddenly Aaron stood abruptly, eyes locked on Spencer. The entire room went silent, still, even Derek looked up from his file, and Spencer just stared at Aaron. No one moved or even dared to make a sound as the two had their awkward stare down, even the clicking of Garcia's heels had ceased, and the tension was constricting.

     “What is going on?” 

     The deep, smooth baritone of David's voice cut through the moment and Emily answered for them all, “We have no idea…”

     David took in the situation, looking from Spencer, to Aaron who was still standing and looking completely shell shocked, then shrugged. “Well, I don't know about you, kid, but I don't plan on standing for the entire briefing.”

     “Right… right, sorry,” he finally managed to pull his gaze away from Aaron, and turned to continue his plan of sitting beside Derek, “I'll just sit-”

     When he turned he was suddenly slammed right into David, who had managed to sneak around him, and they were now in some sort of side stepping dance battle for the chair beside Derek. “Sorry, kid,” they bumped into each other again as they both moved the same way, “I'm so sorry, so sorry.”

     Spencer tried a few more times to get around him, but after more then a few failed attempts he admitted defeat and turned to take the chair beside Aaron, the one chair he didn't want to take. “I'll just… sit… here, I guess.”

     “Yeah, you do that, and I'll sit here beside my good friend, Derek.” 

     Derek gave Dave an amused look, but let it go, and everyone watched as Spencer moved to take the open seat, Aaron finally sitting back down at the same time as Spencer. 

     On the other side of the room, still slightly afraid to move, Garcia slowly sank herself down in the chair beside JJ, and leaned in to talk quietly to the two girls, whisper yelling, “What the hell was that?!”

     “I… I don't know,” Emily stuttered out, a little concerned that as a profiler she didn't even know where to start with the behaviour they just witnessed, '' I actually don't know!”

     “We're gunna have to keep an eye on that right?!” Garcia asked again.

     “Oh, definitely,” JJ chimed in, all three of them sticking their heads close together and continuing to observe the two boys across the table.

     Spencer sat, not quite having the courage to look over at Aaron, but he could tell he was looking at him. Which made him all the more nervous to be sitting there. So instead he occupied himself with opening his case file then digging through his bag for a pen. 

     A light tap on his shoulder broke his severe concentration on finding a pen, and he closed his eyes to steady himself, then turned to his left. Aaron was still staring at him, as he had suspected, but was now holding out a pen to him. He forced himself to look up and make eye contact with Aaron, taking the pen with a shy smile. “Ah… t-thank-you.”

     “You're welcome,” he waited a beat, then asked quietly, “how was your lecture series?”

     “Oh,” Spencer took a pause, thinking back on how he had run out of there like a bat out of hell, and all because of the man currently asking him about it. So he just raised a brow and responded with a slight smirk, “enlightening.”

     Aaron nodded, not quite understanding the underlying message there and Spencer was thankful for that, then leaned in closer to say, “I was going to-” Before he was cut off by Strauss walking into the conference room.

     “Good, you're all here,” she looked around the room and everyone sat up a little straighter as she did, then she turned her attention to Aaron as she continued, “I'll expect you to be in California tonight so that you can get started there early tomorrow morning. Get this solved quickly.”

     “Yes, ma’am.” Aaron nodded.

     She took one last look around the room, then landed on Garcia with a heavy stare, “I'll leave you to your briefing then,” and closed the door behind her as she left.

     “Right, right, the briefing!” She stood quickly, grabbing the remote and pointing it to the screen on the wall, bringing up pictures from the scenes. Anything that was going to be said between Spencer and Aaron was lost behind the case. “Over the last few days San Diego, California has been faced with a slew of murders, to be honest with you much too gruesome for my gorgeous eyes, so I'm just gunna turn away while you all look.”

     She clicked the remote a few times, promptly turning her back to the screen as she did. The team looked upon their victims, all taking a few minutes to gather their thoughts before Emily started the process, “Who are they, Garcia?”

     She clicked a few more times, the unmutilated faces of the victims coming up as she spoke, “Joe Marsden, thirty-three, Karl Jennings, thirty-two, and yesterday's victim Adam Knoxs, thirty-five.”

     “Any connections between them?”

     “None that I could find so far,” she sighed as she explained, “Joe was an elementary school teacher, he taught grade two and from what I can tell was very much loved by both students and parents. Karl worked at a local restaurant as a line cook. And Adam was a receptionist for a private medical practice. As far as I can tell by phone records and credit cards, none of them ever crossed paths in any way.”

     “Keep digging, Garcia, see if you can find anything that might connect these people, no matter how small it may seem.” She nodded at Aaron, then Derek was the next to speak.

     “The victimology is way off,” he said as he turned his chair, pointing to the screen, “there doesn't seem to be a type here. One has blonde hair and blue eyes, the other brunette with brown eyes, and the last guy is balding with grey hairs on the side. None of them look anything even close to similar, so why these three men?”

     “He's right, it doesn't make any sense,” JJ added, “not to mention the fact that each victim seems to have been mutilated differently each time. Joe had his eyes crossed out, Karl had his ears cut off, and Adam had his mouth sewn shut. Are we sure this is even the same unsub for all three murders?”

     “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” Spencer spoke up, everyone turning towards him.

     “Good eye, kid,” David looked over to him, then asked, “what else do you know about this?”

     “The three wise monkeys are a Japanese pictorial maxim, embodying the proverbial principle ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’,” he began, gaining the attention of everyone in the room, “The three monkeys are Mizaru, who sees no evil, covering its eyes. Kikazaru, who hears no evil, covering its ears. And Iwazaru, who speaks no evil, covering its mouth. There are various meanings ascribed to this proverb, some of which tend more to the innocent side of being of good mind, speech, and action. But the phrase is more often than not used to refer to dealing with the immoral side of things in terms of turning a blind eye. It's also sometimes used as a code of silence, perhaps this unsub took it in the literal sense. It's possible that these victims wronged him in some way. Whether they are connected to each other, or only connected through the unsub alone, if they each wrong or betrayed him in a way that pertains to the japanese principle, then this could be it. Maybe he's not a serial killer on a spree but rather a man out for revenge, and maybe he got it.”

     “If he's right, and these three men are the end of his killings, then we may never catch this guy,” Derek said as he turned towards Aaron.

     “That's why we're being called in,” he answered, “California PD has exhausted all their leads, and whether this guy is done killing or not, they need our help to catch him and bring him to justice. Wheels up in thirty.”

~~~~~~~~~~~

     Aaron was sitting in his usual place at the back of the jet while the rest of his team started to file in slowly. Spencer was one of the last of his team to get on, clearly making eye contact with Aaron as well as eyeing the empty seat across from him, but ducking to the side at the last second and sitting in a seat at the very front of the jet. Every part of Aaron was itching to reach out to Spencer and offer him the seat that he deliberately made sure was left empty across from him, but after their tension filled moment in the conference room he thought it best to maybe just leave it alone for now. So he sat alone at the back of the jet, quietly going over his case file while they took off.

     As soon as they were up and level and able to walk around, David was settling himself down in the empty seat he had meant to be for Spencer.  

     “So?” David asked with a sigh, folding his hands together in his lap and looking at Aaron expectantly.

     “So, what?” 

     “Well after all that awkward tension back in the conference room I assumed you must have some juicy gossip to share,” he smirked and shifted in his seat, as if settling in for a long story, “so, did you do it? Did you call him? Is that what that was all about?”

     “No, I didn't get the chance to.”

     “What do you mean you didn't have the chance?” He leaned forward, holding his hands out to Aaron in disbelief, “You had six full days off without any calls, you had plenty of chances to call him.”

     “I had Jack for four of those days, spent the first two on the phone negotiating those four days out of Haley,” he sighed, closing the file on his lap, “and I don't know if Spencer would be all too happy with spending time with both me and my son.”

     “Why wouldn't he be? I'm sure Spencer would love to spend time with Jack.”

     “Well, if it means anything I was going to call him yesterday,” he sighed again, wishing he could have had just one more day of peace, then he would have been able to make that call, “I was going to ask him if he would be interested in joining me and Jack for a walk in the park, or perhaps dinner and a movie night. But just as I was about to call him I received the news from Strauss ordering us back into the field.”

     “A missed opportunity, story of our lives.'' Aaron just nodded. “So what are you going to do about it then?”

     He thought for a second, then answered, “Maybe on our next vacation-”

     “Aaron, that could be months away, we don't even have anything scheduled right now. The kid’s waited this long, but he's not going to wait forever.”

     “Who’s to say he's even waiting for me?”

     “That's the thing,” he shrugged, “you will never know until you ask. And if you keep waiting until the next vacation, or the next day off, there will always be an excuse. Work, Jack, or even just nerves. If you want to know if it is you that Spencer has been waiting for all these years, then you just need to ask.”

     He nodded, David was right, of course he was right, he was the ‘embodiment of love’ after all. And if he kept letting all those excuses get in the way, then he would keep putting it off as he has already for so long, and he would never know how Spencer felt. But then there was that split second on the call… “Well…”

     “Well what, Aaron? Out with it.”

     “I…” He stopped and thought about it for a second, about to back out but then decided to just keep going. Maybe David would have some answers that he didn't. “I can't be certain if this is what I actually heard or not, but when I called him to tell him we had a case, I'm sure he was in the process of saying that he was about to call me.”

     “That's great!” He clapped his hands together.

     “But why would he have been calling me on his vacation?”

     “Obviously he was thinking about you as much as you were thinking about him,” David was actually thrilled over the idea, “maybe he was going to bite the bullet and make the first move, since you're taking your sweet time.”

     “You think?”

     He shrugged with a pouted lip, “That's what it sounds like to me.'' Aaron just hummed, lost in thought, mulling over all this new information. “Just ask him out, Aaron. Why not go to dinner after the case is over?”

     He nodded, “I'll ask him. Once the case is over and we're headed back home, I'll ask him.”

     “Good,” he sat back, folding his hands in his lap again, “but if you don't follow through this time, I will ask him for you myself.”

     Aaron chuckled and shook his head. To most, that would be an empty threat, but Aaron knew better than that when it came to David Rossi. “I'll ask, I promise.”

     “You better.”

     Aaron left it at that, settling back in his chair just as Rossi had. They had a while yet before they landed, so he just resigned himself to reviewing the case file in silence. Now that David was done with his inquisition, for now at least.

~~~~~~~~~~~

     "God, I am so over planes." Spencer just scoffed in the seat beside Derek as he whined, so he turned to him and asked, "Problem, pretty boy?"

     "You're complaining about being stuck on a plane for too long, but Rossi just spent eleven hours flying back from Italy, only to be instantly put on a plane again to fly to California," he lifted his head from the file in his hands, though not looking at Derek as he said, "you spent what, four and a half?"

     "Have you no sympathy?"

     "For you?" He questioned, going back to his case file, "No."

     Derek swiftly smacked him with his own case file, though they both were laughing when he did. They fell into a comfortable silence for a few moments before Spencer asked, "So how did your sand, sun, and fun go?"

     "Well, there was a lot of sand, a lot of sun, but not a whole lot of fun was had."

     "Really?" He turned to Morgan again, "But you seemed so adamant about there being so much fun to be had. What did you spend six days doing at the beach?"

     "You got into my head, kid. I spent all six days reading ‘The Art of War', got through most of it before being called back." Spencer nodded, smirking and pursing his lips as he did, and Derek asked, "What, are you proud of me or something?"

     He waited a second, then answered, "You spent six days reading ‘The Art of War' and you only got through most of it? It took you that long to read it?"

     Derek nudged him with a laugh, “just because you're a genius."

     "So six days of sitting on the beach, reading, and no fun," he thought, then added, "I assume that means no fine exotic women either."

     "Nah, no fine exotic women."

     Spencer's smirk grew impossibly wider at Derek's comment, and incredibly mischievous as he took his opportunity to finally get the one up on him. "Well, handsome exotic men then. I'm not here to judge."

     "Oh, pretty boy!" Derek shouted, the two breaking into a fit of laughter as Derek hit him with the file again, "Coming back with the jokes now?!"

     “Sorry to break up the party,” Aaron said as he came up on Spencer's left, “Garcia has some new information for us.”

     Aaron leaned over Spencer on the end of the booth to place his laptop on the table as everyone gathered around, little to Spencer's knowledge he definitely leaned in a little too far on purpose. And little to Aaron’s knowledge the action almost caused Spencer to spontaneously combust in his seat. But somehow the two managed to hold it together, and Aaron stood back looking at the screen, “Go ahead, Garcia.”

     “So, while you guys were taking off we got a call from the California PD, they found another body. They’re waiting for you guys to get there before they clear the scene.”

     “Alright,” Aaron began, full boss mode now. The authority in his voice always sent a chill down Spencer's spine. “I know it will be late, and everyone’s tired after their travels today, but as soon as we land I would like everyone to head to the latest crime scene. I want as many fresh eyes on the scene as we can get. After that we'll all head to the hotel for some sleep and start early tomorrow morning." Everyone nodded their understanding and then Aaron continued on with the next day's assignments. "Tomorrow morning Prentis and Rossi, I want the two of you to head to the local PD and get us set up, start the geographical profile. Morgan and JJ, I want you two connecting with the families of the victims. Get to know them and see if they might have the missing link that tells us how these victims are connected. Reid, you're with me. We're going to visit the old crime scenes and speak with the coroner."

     Though they were currently sitting on a plane full of profilers, no one noticed the fact that Aaron made sure he was paired up with Spencer. Well, all but one. It also didn't go unnoticed by David when Spencer's neck suddenly turned a nice shade of red when Aaron picked him as a partner. These two would be the death of him, he was sure of it. 

~~~~~~~~~~~

     They arrived on scene late at night. It was dark in the back alleyway, but the lights the local PD had set up lit it like it was day. The crime scene unit was already there, gathering evidence where they could find it, but by the looks of it they hadn't found much. Same as the last three murders. 

     They all split up, David and Aaron going to speak with the officers on site, Emily and Derek to look at the body, and Spencer went with JJ to talk to the few people crowding the other side of the police tape. Though it was in vain, none of them had seen or heard anything and were merely just there out of curiosity. Still they seemed to be without any leads.

     With no evidence and nothing else to help them move forward with the investigation at the scene, Aaron gathered them all and told them to head to the hotel and get some much needed sleep. They would stick with the plan they had made on the jet and go to their respective positions in the morning. It was enraging to come all the way out here, to have a fresh crime scene, and yet still have nothing to help them. Spencer was not happy to be going back to their hotel empty handed, but then again maybe some sleep would help them all regroup.

     He started following behind JJ towards the cars, but stopped as the coroner walked past him, asking him to stop for a moment, “May I take a look at the body before you head to the morgue?” The coroner nodded and waited for Spencer to pull back the zipper and look. 

     “Hey, Reid,” Derek called from the car, waving Spencer towards him, “come on, man, let's head out.”

     “Yeah, one second,” he called back, undoing the zipper, “I just wanted to take a look at the body and see if the killer is still following the pattern of the three wise monkeys-”

     When he laid eyes on the face of the body he dropped the bag and took an immediate, staggering step back. His breathing picked up, given away by the sudden heavy rise and fall of his shoulders, and the team abandoned the cars to start walking over to him, concerned.

     Before they reached him, he stumbled, knees weak. Aaron lunged forward to catch him but Derek beat him to it, grabbing Spencer under the arms as he almost hit the ground. He lowered him slowly, the rest of the team running now to make sure Spencer was okay. 

     “Reid, hey talk to me,” Derek said, allowing Spencer to lean back against him, his eyes still fixed on the gurney, “what’s going on?”

     Without moving his eyes from the body bag on the gurney, he whispered so quietly that Derek was barely able to hear, “I… I know him.”

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

A/N: Please let me know what you guys think XD I love reading your comments and talking to you guys <3 And in the next chapter we get even more Spencer and Aaron, so look forward to that!

#criminal minds fic #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds #spencer x hotch #spencer reid/aaron hotchner #spencer/aaron #spencer reid x aaron hotchner #spencer reid #spencer x aaron #aaron hotchner #hotchner x reid #reid x hotch #hotch #heid #heid fanfic #heid fic #smut #fluff #angst #pining #series #emily prentiss #derek morgan #david rossi #jenifer jareau #Penelope garcia #garcia #erin strauss #the bau #idiots in love

[iyacapao13]

Unforgettable Experience

“Everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.”

This is the story of my life, I’d like to start at the beginning, the very beginning. The day I arrived in this world, my birth. It was exactly 11:00 pm in October 2004 when I was born. My parents decided to name me “Shaniya” which they don’t know what the meaning is. But when I looked it up on the internet, it means a “gift from God”.

I was described as chubby, heavy and has rounded eyes. As time goes on, according to them I started recognized my parents voices, learned how to say strange baby words then knew how to walk & talk. 

I started school at a young age, my mom said I could already read when I was only 3 years old it was fascinating for some because the experts believe that children learn to read at 5-years-old. I was referred as the ‘saling ket-ket’, this term is often a friendly reference to someone joining in an activity, despite not really being a full-fledged member of the group. That is where I learn how to write single letters, how to color and determine what color it is. As far as I can I remember, I wasn’t very social, I was shy to talk to my classmates but then after some weeks, I got used to it.

But then when I turned into an elementary student and had to transfer to a new school and had to adjust to the new environment again. That new environment was very different from my previous school, now I experienced unforgettable moments that are now only in my memories. At a 2nd grade, that’s where I join a contest and as far as I can remember, I didn’t win but it wasn’t really a big deal because I know I can’t always do well, each and every failure opened up my eyes to new opportunities.

4th grade when I joined another contest, but this time it is a poster making contest, the new opportunity. My mom was my coach and I practiced really hard, then I won 2nd place! There aren’t many contestants but still, my hard work paid off. “Effort makes you. You’ll regret someday if you don’t try your best now. Don’t think it’s too late but keep working on it. It may take time but there’s nothing that gets worse when you practice. You may get sad, but it’s evidence that you are doing good.” – Jungkook.

It was my first time trying, stopped, then joined again when I was in 6th grade. It started from the classroom, our teacher told us to draw something related to the theme and mine was picked. After a few days, the school is now picking someone to represent the school. I competed with a number of students, fortunately I was picked. That is where I started to compete at different schools. I won 5th place against 27 schools, public and private at my first competition which is a very big thing for me because it is my first time competing to other school. I can’t exactly remember how many competitions I’ve joined.

At our recognition day, I received some medals because I have been the representative throughout the school year. Then I turned into a junior high school and at 7th grade I stopped joining to contests again but later come back when I was in 8th grade up to 10th grade. 

The nutrition month began and the students were grouped by grade levels, in my group there are two representatives, the other one was me, I won 1st and it felt great when you’ve achieved their expectations but felt pressure at the same time. Buwan ng Wika came and now I’m on the other group and became one of the representative again, then I won 1st again beating the representatives of the two teams. But during those joys after winning/achieving something is not my “always-feeling” I, of course lost some competitions as well and during those times, that is where I began comparing myself to others, I am a social being and I care about what other people think of me. But I realized also, I got my family at my side providing encouragement and support, so why would I stick to that mindset again? After that I’ve seen a lot of improvements on my skills throughout the years of joining, then pandemic came, I decided to practice other art styles and been trying to find my own art style. These experiences taught me so many lesson that I still bring with me up until right now. During this life experiences, my family was out there supporting me, doing what I love the most.

I grew up in a large family, with my parents, sibling, cousins, aunt, uncle and grandparents in just one house. In our house no one ever expects to find something where they left it. Growing up with them, it taught me how to live with all types of people. I learned how to share, all the toys were shared, and the clothes had been passed around so much no one was sure what belonged to whom, and memorize a lot of names because I am sure there are 15 and more people around me and they’re my family so I have to. 

We go out a lot and with the advancement of the technology, it could be addicting for someone at my age and focus more on it rather than bond with family during outings. But if someone made me choose over spending time with my family and spending my time alone with my phone. Without doubt, I would rather spend my time with my family. But technologies has advantages during these types of outings, we could keep our memories by taking pictures and have it saved in our phones then you can just look back in case you miss hanging out with your loved-ones but could not because of the situation right now.

One of the fun experience at the public was going out with them, like going to the church together, eat breakfast, lunch and dinner together. I remember when we went out to bond, we almost filled the whole jeepney and everybody inside was my family, except the driver of course. During the ride, jokes were thrown off to each other and it is so fun to watch. And when we decided to have a family photo shoot, they went to a shop and asked how much was it but it is too expensive so we decided we will take our family photo and it’s free and has access to unlimited takes. Seeing/experiencing this kind of moments with the people you love the most, lasts forever to someone’s heart, mind and memory.

We’re not poor, but not rich either. Our family values are a reflection of who we are. Being Honest, having good manners, having respect, being responsible, and Fear of God is just some of the traits my family taught me. Having them complete is literally the best someone can have, we got a lot of mess but a lot of fun at the same time. It is not always all fun and games, normally there are some argumentations that occurs because of the different opinions we got and with that, it taught me different lessons. Like good listening allows us to demonstrate that we are paying attention to the thoughts given by others because every opinions matter, you get to see someone’s perspective regarding of the particular situation and it maintains productive relationships, and sometimes the only way to establish communication. This type of ability, to listen well to others could be applied to different environments as well, just one example, in school, in a grouping there could have different opinions and I know I have to respect it. Notice how I brought this personality from home to different place. I could say it is a knowledge I could carry around.

These are just some of my unforgettable experiences, proving that to move in the forward direction is to be strong and positive enough to bury every negative experience in the past. Teaching, not just me but also the people around me that let our past experiences teach us and not torment us.

Luxury. It’s not just a condition of abundance but a feeling of great ease and comfort, not every luxury has to involve money. It includes great experiences, embracing small things that create a moment of joy in my everyday life.

#littleluxuriesinlife

[rockcampfifteen]

How I Got to Sesame Street: Bill Sherman Talks Working with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Where He Keeps His Grammys, and Being Ignored by Big Bird

I didn’t think that Rock and Roll Camp XV was even going to happen this year, if I’m being honest, but nothing about this year has been predictable, so here we are. A dozen campers and about as many counselors in a Zoom meeting. We made it work, and it worked well. Since camp wasn’t a physical, in-the-moment experience, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for photos or camper interviews, but we did get the chance to interview Bill Sherman, an Emmy, Tony, and Grammy award winning musician. Bill has worked on musicals like Hamilton and In the Heights and is a music director for Sesame Street. He was laid-back, down-to-earth, and didn’t give any impression that he was full of himself. Bill didn’t act like most award-winning musicians and talked openly about his life and experiences. He mentioned that he had been stuck in traffic, and that he was worried he’d be late for our interview. We knew that he was taking us seriously, that he didn’t just see us as a bunch of kids wanting to have a talk. 

-Elsa

Elsa: I just want to say we appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. We’ve got a lot of questions, so we’ll jump right in. What was the first instrument you learned to play, and what attracted you to it?

My parents got me piano lessons when I was in elementary school, and I was super not into it. I believe the teacher’s name was Mrs. Record—which is hilarious for a music teacher’s name—and she taught me for a couple years, and I was terrible at it, so I quit. And then in fourth grade we had to pick an instrument, and the music teacher where I went to school was a woodwind player. He was like, “Bill you should play the clarinet.” I was like, “Okay, sounds great.” And then in sixth grade—this is a good story—he goes, “You know, the clarinet has the same mechanics and fingerings of saxophones,” and I was like, “No way, that sounds like a way cooler instrument than the freaking clarinet.” If any of you are clarinet players, I don’t mean to offend you. Also, I still play the clarinet. Anyway, he showed me the saxophone and I was immediately attracted to it. And when he left the room, I took the saxophone and left with it and I didn’t tell him. So I stole it. I took it home. And it became my thing. I was obsessed with it. My teacher’s name was Gary Meyer. He later went on to be my private saxophone teacher for like a hundred years, until I went to college, and now, he in fact works for me. He plays in the Sesame Street Band. He’s a woodwind player. So it was a pay-it-forward, full circle moment, to have my fourth grade music teacher be in my band.

I got really into jazz. I went to a real big jock high school, and I stopped playing sports and just played saxophone, all day every day, all the time. And in college it became my identity. Mike can attest—I was the saxophone guy. I led bands, and I played all the time… if you see movies about colleges, and there’s a music guy? I was kind of that guy. 

I later taught myself to play piano—another full circle moment—because composing on the saxophone for anybody is a difficult thing to do. I have a number of guitars that I have no idea how to play.

Elsa, by the way, has your name become like the coolest ever since the whole Frozen situation? My kids would think that’s the coolest thing ever.

Elsa: Frozen came out when I was in about second grade, and of course I was so hyped for it. I went to a theater with a friend of mine, and afterwards I was like, “Oh, I was the Ice Queen, oh yeah!!” And of course you go back to elementary school, and everyone’s like, “Oh, you have ice powers,” and so pretty soon I was tired of that. But it’s kind of gone away. It went away for a few years, and people stopped associating it with my name. And then Frozen 2 came out and here we are again—

(Bill Laughs.)

Michael: I have a question for you, Bill.

Okay, Mike. Does everybody know that Mike used to be this amazing trumpet player, and he was in my band, and he wrote for the band, and he packed this unbelievable punch, and he was like this tall, and he was this awesome powerhouse, and truth be told... I don’t know if he knows this, but in certain theory classes I would cheat off him, because he had a way better ear than I did.

Michael: I wasn’t going to bring it up, but I do think it’s hilarious that I was better at theory than you. But so anyway, in the band, you were the only one really bringing in your own songs—so I’m wondering where the urge and the confidence to start writing your own material came from?

In high school I wrote poems, and then my senior year of high school, I wrote this instrumental thing and I played it at my graduation. All the people who thought I was a nerd for being into music, they stood up and clapped and I thought that was so freaking cool. That was my first move into composing. And in college it was just kind of what we did. It just seemed like how hard can it be? You start breaking down pop tunes… at that time, we were kind of doing jam band, Ozomatli tunes, four chords and the truth. And you find that pop music in general is four chords and the truth. Like the Foo Fighters: they play four chords really quietly, and then the same four chords way louder, that’s just what they do, and it’s awesome, and it works every time. 

The other thing about writing music is that it’s very hard to know if you’re quote unquote “good at it.” I’ve written thousands of songs, and I’d say 75% of them are terrible. But 25% of them people really dig into, and then you wonder, Why this song? Like for Sesame Street, I get very immediate feedback. My friends who have kids, they’ll immediately let me know, This is the song. I wrote this song for Maren Morris on Sesame Street called “Oops, Whoops, Wait, Aha” which is about children calming down, waiting to answer a question, not just like going crazy, and people will send me photos or videos of their kids dancing along to this particular tune, which is great. But that’s the first time in four years that anybody’s contacted me, and in those four years I’ve written hundred of songs that nobody cares about. And so, if you get a good one every four years, that’s great. Songwriting is like anything, you’ve gotta  try it, and then you try it some more. 

The other best way to do things that are creative and original is to at first emulate people. That’s what we were doing—Mike and I in our band in college. I liked Salif Keita, and I liked Fela Kuti, and I was like, I can write a song like this. We wrote songs that sounded, almost exactly like Fela Kuti tunes. It’s not really original, it definitely sounds like something you’ve heard before, but that’s how you learn how to do it. Study the craft, how other people did it.

Marilla: On Sesame Street, how do you write thousands of songs and not make them all sound the same?

That’s a really good question. I have in fact repeated myself a number of times. I was working on another show a couple years ago, and I wrote this song, and it was great, and they loved it, and then a year and a half later I sent them another song, and they got back to me and were like, “Hey, sorry to say this, but I’m pretty sure this is this,” and they sent me back the song I’d written previously, and it was almost the same exact song, and it was so freaking embarrassing. But I’ve talked with Max Martin about this, and what he does is collaborate. Invite people in. Not to steal their knowledge, but he constantly has new people coming into his fold, because I think you’re right, after a while you just start repeating yourself. 

The fun thing about Sesame Street is that it can be any genre. Nothing is genre specific. I can write a hip hop tune one day. And a bossanova the next day. And a ballad another day... One of my favorite things about Sesame Street is that we’re able to bring on new people to keep it interesting and fresh. I’ve been employing more women lately, because there was a time when my writing staff was really male-heavy. Also, Abby is a girl, Rosita is a girl, we need to have that voice. Lately my job at Sesame Street has become more of being like a procurer of music, as opposed to physically writing it—more of like a producer role. People send me stuff all the time. Feel free to get my email from Mike if you have songs you want me to listen to... I will listen to anything.

Lyla: Do you have any advice for younger people—or people in general—when it comes to writing and creating music?

My advice would be to not give up. Not everyone is going to like your stuff. There’s just no way. It’s not gonna happen. It’s a lot of work to be a songwriter, because you’ll write 100 songs, and 98 of them will be terrible, and two of them will be great. 

My first couple years in college, I got asked to be in like 100 bands, and I said yes to everyone. Because initially, you have to say yes to everything. You have to play in a crappy cover band. And you have to play in a cool band like we were in, and you have to play in a funk band, because everybody plays in a funk band in college, and then you get to a point where you turn a corner, and then you can start saying no. I didn’t start saying no until five years ago. 

Lyla: Another question I have is that you mentioned you used to play in a lot of bands in college, and earlier you mentioned playing at your senior year graduation—did you ever think you would come this far, working with Lin-Manuel Miranda, and writing big musical pieces? Did you ever expect to earn awards or anything?

Well, no. I don’t think you ever expect awards. Success is a whole other thing—you can’t prepare yourself for things like that, it just sort of happens. In the process of saying yes to everything, I got myself into positions that I never would have expected. But when we were in college, all I wanted was to be a saxophone player, and move to New York, and make no money, and just sort of grind it out, and then I met Lin my sophomore year of college. I music directed his musical. And I had never music directed a musical, I had no idea what that meant, but I said yes. And I went on to direct all of his musicals in college, and then we graduated college, and we were roommates forever, and then it was like, “Hey, people want to make In the Heights into something,” and I was like, “Okay, that seems like the most logical thing to be doing,” so  we made In the Heights…

I got involved in musicals just randomly, because I said yes to something. I’d never liked musicals. I’d seen Rent, with the original cast, but I’d never listened to Sondheim, or Andrew Lloyd Webber…

But the success thing, it all happened very quickly. Between the ages of 22 and 26. In those four years, it was like marriage, children, awards. I wasn’t expecting any of that stuff.

People come over to my house and pose with my awards, which makes me really uncomfortable, and then one person drank out of the Grammy once... that happened. I have a platinum record in my bathroom. I didn’t know where else to put it. 

Elsa: Have you ever thought about writing your own musical?

It’s weird to go from writing minute and a half long songs that are like a single verse and a chorus, to writing these ten minute long opuses that have to have all this narrative in them, and do all this stuff—it’s definitely a different side of my brain. With & Juliet, it was taking Max Martin’s music and turning it into a musical. Deconstructing all these pop hits like “Oops I Did It Again.”

Marilla: How did it feel to see Hamilton on Disney Plus all these years after you worked on it?

It was far out. It was like seeing an old friend. It’s filmed really well, and you’re seeing views of things you’ve never seen before, it sounds fantastic… it just brought back a lot of old memories. Chris Jackson has been my best friend for like a hundred years, and so has Lin, and seeing them on stage, it was a reminder of how good they are… Now, years later, my children have memorized the record, they’re singing the whole thing, which is unbelievably irritating. My daughter—she thinks she knows the whole thing, but she really doesn’t, she just makes up her own lines during the really fast parts, which is really funny, and makes me laugh. I watched it the day it came out. It was a nice excuse to reach out to friends and tell them how good it is, how good they are.. And at a time when theaters are closed, it was cool to see people excited about seeing theater..

Lizzy: What’s your favorite thing to work on, out of all these different projects?

When we were in college, I thought being in a band was the coolest thing ever, and I wanted to play live music for my whole life, and I didn’t want to do anything else. And now I do other things, and all I want to do is play in a band in front of people! Once a year Sesame Street has a gala that some very famous person will come and play at. Last year it was John Legend, two years ago it was Michael Buble, and so there was this big band, and I played in it, and I had so much fun. I kind of miss performing. I play in this thing called Freestyle Love Supreme, which is this documentary that was on Hulu, we make up rap songs--and that’s fun, but I play keyboards, sort of behind the scenes, and so I sort of miss having a band, like we did in college. I’m getting all these memories, Mike, about WestCo Cafe.

These days my favorite thing is collaborating with new folks. We just finished the In the Heights movie, which comes out next year, Sesame Street goes into production in a couple weeks… I’ve been incredibly lucky and honored to do what I do, so talking about it always makes me feel sort of strange, because to me it’s just what I do, but to you it’s like, there’s no way that’s a real job, and explaining it sounds ridiculous, and I’m glad you wanted to listen to me talk about myself for half an hour.

Peter: What’s it like working with Big Bird?

Every day that I walk on to the Sesame Street set, I kind of have to pinch myself a little bit. The guy who played Big Bird passed away a couple years ago. He’s also the guy who played Oscar the Grouch, and he didn’t really know me for a couple years, and then I went to an award show, and I won an award, and he’s actually the guy who presented it to me, and so he hands me the award, and he goes, “Oh my God, I never knew what you did.” And so imagine Big Bird saying to you, “I never knew what you did.” And that was terrifying. Every time I hear Big Bird’s voice, or Kermit’s voice, or Grover --- it freaks me out, because I was a big Grover fan when I was a kid. Those are the times when you’re like, Whoa, this is surreal.  

#pendleton #rock and roll camp #sesame street #hamilton #in the heights #lin manuel miranda

[iamacoward-icannotchange]

Pouring the heart out.

I always try to be a good person and I constantly fail doing so. I’ve checked a million times if I am a sociopath or a psycopath because I am afraid of being one; I’ve made self introspection a million times to check my terrible behaviors. I’ve searched for an explanation, I’ve hated myself, I’ve confronted my fears; I’ve done so much shit, to yet, not be able to improve myself. Now, with the quarantine, it’s the only thing that has gone through my brain. Having nightmares every night is about to drive me insane; after months of always going to bed so tired that it was impossible to remember my dreams. Being away from where I grew up means I’m deprived from everything I at some point considered familiar (but not loved).

I’ve heard a lot of explanations... I’ve heard that my problems come from masculinity, from not being thankful enough, from being sexist and from an infinity of reasons that don’t seem to adapt to what I feel. In the end, everything sounds like my fault and as much as I try; there’s something inside me that can’t change...

The more and more I try to be better, the more problems I run into. I’m always a toxic friend, a bad student, a terrible boyfriend, a terrible brother and a terrible son to my mother. I tend to joke that I still live to finish graduate school; but it’s not an actual joke, I have fetishized that after having a successful career I’ll be able to separate from all this people I dissapoint. I even, in the end, decided to study something STEM-related to be able to make the amount of money I thought it was necessary to run away.

I write these words being absolutely aware of how aggressive and toxic I am; how my girlfriend and I are a complete shitshow of yelling, how before her I called a girl every time I was drunk expecting her to tell me she loved me, how I get angry at my friends as soon as they treat me like a stupid and especially I am incredibly aware of the things that I say when anxiety and anger overcome me. I know I’m a piece of garbage, avoid reminding it. And yes, I am also incredibly aware of my privilege of growing as a heterosexual white male in an upper middle class family from a third world country.

I just can’t forget one of my recurring nightmares during this time; one of the most sad and unfair scenes of my entire life, something I lived when I was probably around 11 or 12 years old (it’s not relevant). I already warn to the readers that the following lines might trigger some unexplored emotions and feelings.

My sister and I went to private school, a very well known and prestigious bilingual school in our country; this was a project of my dad, he wanted us to be successful people like him. Both of us assisted that school from our first school years to the last ones which in the end gave us a big step ahead in life; at a high monetary cost which my dad always paid gladly. The school was highly strict, since kindergarten and my parents had some trouble with the system since they were divorced and a lot of material from the school was in english and my mom is a monolingual.

I always was a troubled child, always trying to get attention from my classmates and teachers. I didn’t cause much trouble, but I had (and have) a very aggressive personality, which according to my parents is a bit unexplicable. I never had friends during kindergarten, nor during elementary school; I played Pokémon alone and started playing MMORPGs when I was around 11 because of this. During that time I also became addicted to reading, since my mom usually didn’t like me to go out with friends because I was problematic. Since I always got angry at my classmates because of offensive jokes and stuff, my mom constantly received calls from school becuse of my aggressive behavior.

I was also very aggressive to my sister. I always had mood swings and got very aggressive as soon as she pushed certain buttons. I am incredibly ashamed and I feel a huge amount of guilt because of this.

One day, most likely after a lot of problems from my side... My sister received an appointment with the kindergarten teacher. My mom came from work and saw it, after seeing it she started yelling like crazy. She usually sent us to bed at 8 pm and we had to keep our door open and avoid waking her up. The memory is blurry, but I was already in bed, I just remember seeing her and listening to her, going towards my sister’s room. She got in, kept yelling and my sister kept crying; I heard a couple of noises of my mom hitting her, she cried inconsolably.

After that, my mom called my dad and said he had to go to the appointment, because she wasn’t going to go through that shame and she was not going to ask for a day at her job. My dad, since he’s an great Dr. and academic (but even greater dad), had a more flexible schedule and were able to go. Days later I heard about the outcome of that appointment, it was an appointment that was sent to most parents; it was to speak about the development of the kid in the second language the school taught... I’ve never seen something so unfair in my entire life, she suffered just because my parents had to go to an appointment; my sister at that time was the most pure and innocent human being so far and I didn’t do anything. I probably even made it worse because of all the problems I had at school...

There’s not enough words to say sorry, sister. I’m sorry I was not able to do anything... I’m sorry for generating the trouble that made mom think that way. I’m sorry because I was aggressive...

I’m sorry sister... I was supposed to protect and do something you and I fucked up.

#sister #sorry #sad story #trigger #nightmare #true story #mom #en quarantaine #quarantine stories #anxienty #i hate my mom

[melodysilverknight]

Activity 1: Autobiography

My name is (fullname), I'm currently (age) years old and will soon be turning (to be age) this (day/month of birth) of 2020. I am currently living with my maternal grandparents, Mrs. (Maternal grandmother's full name) and Mr. (Maternal grandfather's full name), in (complete current address) along with my, soon to be (to be age) year old, younger brother, ( younger brother's full name). We moved to Batangas 7 years ago but before that we used to live in Quezon City.

We live in (previous address) which intersected with the highway. Our house, or rather apartment, was within distance of the church, marketplace, and the mall, which made a lot of things, especially shopping, very convenient. I lived there with my father, Mr. (Father's full name), my mother, Mrs. (Mother's full name), my paternal grandmothers, (Paternal grandmother's full name) and her sister (Paternal grandmother's name) and, whenever she was around, my paternal aunt, (paternal aunt's name). For the most part of me and my brother's living there, we didn't get to spend too much time with our parents since they both worked, our mother at (occupation), and our father at the (occupation), meaning they were never home a lot and we mostly only got to see them on the weekends, so it was mostly our grandmothers who took care of us and we spent time with, even as toddlers, however, whenever we did get to spend time with them it was always a lot of fun. One of our main family activities back then was to head out to the mall parking lot behind the church in the morning, during those times the parking lot would be close to or completely empty, so we would take the car and head to the parking lot to either jog or play frisbee. There was even one time, while my father was off on his own jogging while me and my mother and brother were playing with the frisbee, I decided I wanted to go and join my father, so I did the most sensible thing I could think of, and ran after him, little did I know, something was going on behind me. Some people had come to the parking lot to jog as well and brought their dog with them, for some reason it got loose and started going after me, my mother and brother noticed and were yelling at me then I noticed my father had already stopped his jog and was gesturing behind me which is when I finally noticed the dog on my tail. I ran for dear life, as much as I loved dogs and still do, at the time I still didn't know how to handle myself around dogs other than the ones we owned so I was scared silly. By the time the dog's owners finally caught it I was already out of breath. While I was taking a breather my folks had a small chat with the dog owners then headed over to me where we talked and eventually ended up laughing about the whole incident. After the jog we would head to the market to do the regular weekend shopping. During this, while mother would finish up her shopping I would partake in my little tradition of buying and eating my casava cake.

One of the other things I did with my family was visiting wildlife institutions. We used to visit Manila zoo and the nature park of the Quezon city branch of the World Wildlife Fund. As you could probably tell I have a thing for animals, they're my passion and I love them with every fiber of my being, from the biggest animal in the world, the Blue whale, to the smallest and most resilient creature in existence, the Tardigrade, and even the one animal that terrifies me completely, the spider, I have never once tired of the creatures of this planet and even to this day they still intrigue me. My love for animals was inspired by Steve Irwin, the man known around the world as the "Crocodile Hunter", he was a world renowned wildlife conservationist from Queensland, Australia and a biologist and zoologist who specialized in reptiles. I've watched Steve work with and save animals all over the world alongside his wife, Terri, and his daughter, Bindi, and because of this they became my life idols and have taught me so many things about animals and the beauty of nature and its creatures. Whenever we would visit the zoo or nature park one of my favorite things to do was to feed the animals, I'd head to the gazelle or impala enclosure with my family and I'd feed them fallen leaves through the metal barriers and whenever I did I felt as if the Irwins were with me and whenever I did I always wondered, is this what it was like for them everyday at Australia zoo, getting to be with those animals everyday of their lives. Me and my father also used to play spotting games at the zoo, whenever we would get to an enclosure that had a water hole or thick brush we would try our best to find the animals in the enclosure, of course my father would always win but it's always fun regardless.

In the years I had spent living in Quezon city, I attended 2 different elementary schools. For my first grade up to third grade I went to (name of school), a private school then for fourth and fifth grade I attended (name of school) then finally I moved to Batangas where I spent my last year in elementary school at (name of school). Looking back on my more pre-mature school years, I can say for certain now that my school life, in comparison to my private life, was not what I would call the most pleasing experience. Growing I had always been very socially challenged, although I would make the effort to introduce myself and try to make friends with my other classmates, I was never really able to maintain the bonds I had made and just ended up becoming estranged again but worse because I already knew them and they already knew me so I drew and came to the conclusion that even though they knew me, they never approached me, so I won't try to bother them anymore. And so, I kept up with my pattern over and over and over again, I thought it was a good thing, that I just gave them their space, but it wasn't. I ended up more socially awkward and estranged than before, I didn't know how to properly handle myself around people and I just got more and more shy. Things then took a turn for the worst when I started getting bullied, being the already shy character I was was bad enough but getting looked down on and picked on made it several times worse, the feeling of awkwardness I had before was intensified by intimidation and loneliness which made me even more timid. Looking past all the bullying one of the only things about school were the yearly field trips, something not only I, but all of my classmates would look forward to. It was during a field trip I took that I had my first visit to Ocean Adventure a marine facility that rivaled Ocean Park to me at the time,and my first trip to Enchanted Kingdom. My school bullying experience didn't stop until after I had graduated and reached their peak in 5th grade when it was my group's turn to clean the classroom after classes that day and my classmates thought it would be fun to pull a prank on me so they trapped me in the classroom holding the door closed while I tried to get out. Now I know it's been my flaw to take things seriously a bit too much but that was a bad time to pick on me and a poor choice of action, 1: I was shy and timid and didn't know how to respond well to others; 2: the school creeped me out so I wasn't comfortable getting left alone or locked in; and 3: the ones who pulled the prank were my classmates I considered very obnoxious and loud the kind of people who really intimidated me at the time. I went home crying that day, when my folks found out they went to my school with me the next day and complained about it but it never did completely stop.

High school was a turning point in my life, after six whole years of getting bullied and nearly experiencing depression I would finally be able to get away from it all, the city and bullies. At first I was very reluctant to attend junior high school in a school I wasn't all that familiar with but then my folks mentioned there weren't any lower grades in the school so we would all be new to the experience so I agreed to go in the end. My junior high school were all spent attending, what was formerly referred to as, (name of school), it was here that I had made my first real friends. I started my time at my new school in the same way I did at my previous schools, with introductions, but as the days went by I started seeing the pattern again. I honestly thought that things would end up the same, don't get me wrong, I'm happy about the fact that no one bullied me sure but I was still socially awkward, then things changed when I met, them. Halfway through the first quarter I got to know 5 other girls from my class. First was Ms. Berry, she was also a quiet girl in class so I was able to relate with her, she was also cheerful and nice, I even met her at church once, turns out she goes to the same church. Next there was Yshie, she became my bestfriend, she was quiet, stern looking and at first slightly gloomy, but when I got to know her it turns out we had a lot in common. We both had a love for anime and sketching, and turns out our birthdays were really close together mine was on (month and day of birth) and her's was was on the (day of birth). Chuchay was next, now compared to the first two, she was much more outgoing, she was bubbly, hyper, cheerful and overall very musically talented. She was a great singer and could even play guitar, she was awesome, and to tell you the truth, she became one of my music idols along with Taylor Swift, not that she ever knew that. Another musically talented one was Jingjing, let me tell you, those hands of her's did magic on guitar and keyboard. Like Chuchay, she was outgoing and cheerful but much calmer than Chuchay at te time, she used ro play guitar in the classroom whenever we had no classes and my other friends including the next one usually sang along to her accompaniment while I'd stay quiet. Last but not the least there was ate A, she was the most mature out of all of them in my opinion, she was the big sister of the group and had an attitude to match meaning she was sassy, but in a good way. Together the six of us founded our own friends group called (name of friends group), we all did so many things together but the rest of the story will have to be for a different time.

[natsthinkitythinkthinkthonk]

Saori Hayami - Interviews

I just read a few really interesting articles. The links are sourced, and I’m just going to be copying and pasting my favourite responses here. Due to the length, I’ll only be doing a snippet of the first interview here.

SAORI HAYAMI INTERVIEW: OTAKON 2014

Interview Info:  Originally Posted 12/08/2014 (August 12, 2014) Written by Ray for Anime Diet

You decided to become a voice actress in elementary school. Why did you decide to pursue that so early in your life?

Well, looking back—I really did start very early! But I think that was the time when I had the most energy about my dream. I didn’t think so much about the process of getting used to it, but I was thinking more like  “Oh, there is this kind of job. Wow, it must be fun!” So I decided very quickly to pursue it that way.

You play piano and draw well, we heard. Have you ever won any awards for them?

(Laughs.) I never actually entered a contest, but I did have piano recitals. As for drawing, as you might have guessed from my laughter... I’m really not that good at it. But when I was in elementary school, I had private drawing lessons and the drawings from those lessons were shown at the Ueno art museum. I mentioned that once on a radio show, and for some reason that was picked up and included as part of my profile. But my drawings are totally opposite from the ones you might imagine.

In Mahouka, you play a sister who has strong emotional feelings toward her older brother. They almost act like lovers. What’s your opinion on brother/sister relationships in anime?

I don’t have brothers or sisters—I’m an only child—so I don’t know what it’s like to have siblings at all, let alone falling in love with them! I can imagine if I had a brother, but to fall in love with him, I couldn’t ever see that in my life. Still, my close friends who have siblings don’t think they can have a romantic relationship with them, so perhaps if I ever had a brother, I don’t think I would have a romantic relationship with him either.

[Nat Note: JUST SAY NO. INCEST IS NEVER OKAY. IT’S WRONG. EVEN ONLY-CHILDREN KNOW THAT!]

Otakon '14: Saori Hayami interview

Interview Info: Originally posted 24/08/2014 (August 24, 2014) Written by Jeff Cheung for Japanator

What is your approach to voice acting? How do you get in character and create a voice?

If I don't know the work, I use the resources provided by the audition. I would skim the material and create an image for the character.

Do you try to become the character? Or do you understand what the character first and then do what you think the character would do?

[...]I'm not the type that would first understand the character to become the character. I would first get the feel, the aura of the character to first get a grip on it. As the story moves on then I would be inspired by that, as the story moves on and develops the character, to flesh out the character.

Can you share with us how it is dubbing western TV shows into Japanese?

I haven't done enough dubbing to say "this is how it is or ought to be," but in my opinion dubbing a film into Japanese can really bring out a new angle or change the feeling of the film. [...] A typical 2-hour movie will take a day to do the recording, so there's a degree of difficulty in dubbing a whole 2 hour in a single day. It's always interesting to see how the film is expressed from a Japanese perspective given the Hollywood movie probably took much more time to create. That said, I'm always a bit more nervous when dubbing a movie, so I don't really have much time to stop and think about it. I did a dub for a movie[...], but I am too embarrassed to go see it.

How do you feel about performing at anime or game events? How do you approach that as a voice actress?

So there are a lot of types of events in Japan that I participated in. There are talk events, singing events, autograph, handshake events. Then there are things like drama CDs, Blu-ray commentaries, etc. I see events being a way to come face-to-face with people who enjoy my works. While it might be nerve-racking at times, until then, I don't know or see the faces of the people out there that enjoy my work. It's important for me that I get to see these people and understand that my work matters.

Any parting comments for your overseas fans?

I feel happy being able to see everyone. There is a great distance between Japan and the fans here, but I feel today that the distance may not be all that great. Using anime/manga as a window I hope we can share our ties together, despite the physical distance. Lastly, I want to thank all my fans for the continuing support.

Interview: Saori Hayami

Interview Info: Originally posted 7/01/2015 (January 7, 2015) Written by Daniel Briscoe for Anime News Network

Growing up, was singing and working in entertainment always your dream, or was there something else you wanted to do when you were younger?

When I was small, I found performing in front of other people a bit tough. I actually avoided it as much as possible. When I would go to one of those sentai shows at an amusement park, the heroes would ask for a courageous kid from the audience to help them defeat the bad guy, and I would never raise my hand. My mother would tell me, “Come on, raise your hand! You can do this!” But I was not one of the “courageous kids.” I didn't want to. At the same time, I loved singing and acting, and I loved to perform things from my own imagination. Now here I am, doing the things I thought I could only imagine doing in reality, through songs and voice acting.

As you began to develop your voice, did you have a moment when that stage fright went away and performing was no longer as scary as it used to be?

It started when I first entered school for training in voice acting. I was still a child who couldn't perform in front of people and couldn't express myself to their faces, but I really wanted to go to this school. I couldn't tell the people around me that that's what I wanted, though. Instead, I left a flyer for the school on the kitchen table. When my mom came home and saw it, she said, “What is this?” I answered, “Voice actors seem really interesting these days. I think it might be an interesting occupation.” Then my mother said I should give them a call, and that first step was when things started to change. I realized that I have to be brave and do something in order to change anything. My mother pushed me to make that call and apply, but she was never going to do it for me. It was all up to me, and that was a big realization for a girl that was only 12 or 13 years old.

After you finished your formal training, how long was it before getting your first performance job? Can you describe how you felt the first time someone said “We want you to sing” or “We want you to do voice acting for us”?

I was actually in school for seven years, but our school has a program sort of like an internship where at the end of each year, people who are successful will be chosen to enter the industry. It was at the end of my second year that I was chosen to take my first job, and after that, it was a mix of work in the industry and training in school going on simultaneously. It's like before I was even out of school, I was having to face reality, and I was facing the real tests without having learned any of the theories behind the answers. In school, they mainly tell you how to behave and perform in front of the mic, so there was a lot I didn't understand about the much larger process. [...]I was terrified and I was put on the spot a lot, without my mother there. Those first years were nerve-wracking. My parents couldn't be there with me most of the time, and there was just a lot to handle.

What music was influential for you when you were growing up? Do you have an artist or group that influences you still, or maybe one that inspired you when you were younger?

Music [of all types of genres] was constantly being played in my household, so I grew up with a lot of variety. My mother especially loved funk or soul music, and I don't think I could tell you the names of the groups, but if I heard the music now, I would know it and I could tell you when I first heard it because it became such a deep part of me. The music from those times is what I remember most strongly. Japanese music, especially rock-style music, is the kind that I could actually sing along with so I would practice singing along with those songs. Apart from that, I also learned piano as a child, so I love classical music too.

Do you have a favourite [director] to work with, or maybe someone who taught you something new while you were working with them?

That is a very hard question. For every project I have worked on, the staff has given me at least one new thing to take home with me. Specifically, the sound director for the “Eden of the East” films, Kazuhiro Wakabayashi [...] taught me a lot. It's not like he hammered lots of stuff into me while we were working together. [...]He would tell me how to see a scene or what to do over a dinner, conversationally. He is more like a fatherly figure than a boss. I learned many things from him not just about technique, but as a person. It's hard to choose one person over another when you've worked with so many because they become like family.

#saori hayami #seiyuu interview #seiyuu

[kanasmusings]

[Translation] Growth Drama CD Vol. 3 - Track 1

I finally got a copy of the third volume~ Please ask @zedin6 privately for the files ^^ Remember to follow their rules as well should she give you some.

I’m supposed to be sleeping but I love Growth more than sleep so here’s the first track~

Track 1 [序奏] “Introduction”

Under the cut, enjoy~

Track 1 [序奏] “Introduction”

  MAMORU: I won’t ever forget the very first time that I encountered music.

MAMORU: I was in 5th year of elementary school.

MAMORU: It was probably during lunch break. A girl from the same class was playing a grand piano in the music room.

MAMORU: I was asked by my friends to play soccer with them and was just about to head to the schoolyard.

MAMORU: I heard the beautiful sound of a piano when I was passing through the music room and I stopped in my tracks.

MAMORU: I don’t know how it happened but after playing one or two short songs, she asked me, “Fujimura-kun, want to try playing it, too?”

MAMORU: She also said, “If you can’t play then I’ll teach you how to.”

MAMORU: I simply nodded in response.

MAMORU: To an elementary schooler like me back then, something like a grand piano was so special.

MAMORU: It was used by the person in class who can play it best during school recitals.

MAMORU: Oftentimes, it’s something that can’t be touched by anyone other than the music teacher.

MAMORU: I remember being nervous about touching something so special.

MAMORU: I reached out my hand and pressed the ‘do’ key. The piano produced sound properly even with my hand.

MAMORU: It was a beautiful sound.

MAMORU: That was when I first came to face music.

MAMORU: It was the sound of our meeting.

  ***

  (FLASHBACK)

(piano playing)

MAMORU: Alright!

GIRL (MATSUYAMA): (clapping) Fujimura-kun, that’s amazing! You learned how to play so fast.

MAMORU: (giggles) Thank you! I think it’s because Matsuyama-san’s way of teaching was good.

MATSUYAMA: That’s not true. I only taught you the normal notes. I think that Fujimura-kun has a natural talent for music! If you learn properly I’m sure you’ll be even better than me!

MAMORU: Do you think so…? I-it would be nice if that were true.

MAMORU: I thought that music was boring because we had to remember so-and-so composer or so-and-so piece during class. I’m happy to find out that it’s this fun.

MATSUYAMA: Did you really not take piano lessons?

MAMORU: Uh… I think studying it is kinda impossible… It requires money so…

MATSUYAMA: Ah… Ah, that’s right…

MATSUYAMA: Sorry… That was insensitive of me.

MAMORU: Ah, er… No, it’s okay. I don’t mind it so don’t worry.

MATSUYAMA: … Um… You see? I really think that Fujimura-kun’s amazing.

MATSUYAMA: Even though you didn’t play before, you managed to play it without sheet music after watching me, right? You remember it so fast and it’s accurate, too!

MATSUYAMA: Ah! Even though you push keys randomly they turn into a proper song, right? That’s amazing, too!

MAMORU: (laughs nervously) You think so…?

MATSUYAMA: Music doesn’t really have anything to do with money or school grades. I think anybody can do it.

MATSUYAMA: Even if you don’t play you can sing. See? Even when you clap your hands that’s music, isn’t it?

MATSUYAMA: That’s why… Um… What I’m trying to say is…

MATSUYAMA: Continue playing music, okay, Fujimura-kun? Since you definitely have talent! Do it in my stead, please.

MAMORU: Me…?

MATSUYAMA: I didn’t tell you, did I? I’ll be transferring [schools] over summer break. We’re going to move to Hokkaido because of my father’s job.

MATSUYAMA: Since there are no tutors nearby I might have to quit playing the piano…

MAMORU: Eh? Ah… Is that so…?

MATSUYAMA: Yeah… That’s why I thought that it’d be wonderful if you would continue playing music in my stead. It’s a talent that I discovered, right~?

MATSUYAMA: And then I’ll brag about it to my friends when you become famous~ I’ll tell them that I’m the one who taught you how to play the piano~!

MAMORU: Matsuyama-san…

MATSUYAMA: I’m sure that your music will be very beautiful!

(FLASHBACK ENDS)

***

  KENSUKE: Everyone in my house has always loved music.

KENSUKE: Though, it’s more like a hobby where we listen to our favourite idols or go sing karaoke instead of listening to the usual classical music.

KENSUKE: In the first place, the first time that my mom and dad met was during a foreign artist’s concert so I guess it would be obvious that we’d like music.

KENSUKE: I have one older sister who’s loved idols since she was little due to my parents’ influence.

KENSUKE: As a fan and a supporter she decided to go audition, too, and she somehow took me to great places.

KENSUKE: I went to an audition of hers once. It was a really huge public audition and she made it to the final screening. The entire family went to support her.

KENSUKE: To be chosen as part of the top ten or so among hundreds who auditioned, my sister was quite amazing.

KENSUKE: By the way, the results would be posted on screen and they’d be making an appearance in an agency for about two years but that’s not what’s important here.

KENSUKE: What’s important is the fact that my life changed on that very stage that day.

KENSUKE: When we went to go see my older sister backstage to show our support.

KENSUKE: Someone from an entertainment industry called out to me, not my sister.

KENSUKE: “Are you interested in the world of showbiz?” he said.

KENSUKE: At that time I didn’t think about it and just said, “No, I’m not,” but…

KENSUKE: My sister saw it clearly and remembered it. It seems like that was the first time she thought that maybe I could do it, too.

KENSUKE: My sister sent out my audition form to a big-name agency where an idol she liked worked.

KENSUKE: Even though there was a huge list, I managed to pass the auditions on my first try.

  ***

  (FLASHBACK)

(Twinkle Twinkle Little Star playing on the piano and then abruptly stops)

KENSUKE: Geez, I don’t wanna! I’ve had enough!

SISTER: Aww, don’t say that, Ken-chan. One more. Just try it one more time, please~

KENSUKE: That’s fine, Nee-chan! I’m not suited for the piano!

SISTER: But… When you learn how to play I’m sure that the singing and dancing lessons will be easier for you.

SISTER: You managed to pass the auditions and get into the agency so let’s try our best one more time, okay?

KENSUKE: Those lessons… I don’t have to do them if I don’t want to.

SISTER: Eh…?

KENSUKE: I don’t wanna be a part of the agency either! You just did this on your own, Nee-chan!

KENSUKE: I was laughed at at school, you know?! “Do you think you’re cool now?” they ask me…!

SISTER: Ken-chan…

KENSUKE: I… I’m not like Nee-chan. I don’t want to be a celebrity…

KENSUKE: I just happened to pass… I’m not really…

SISTER: I see… You’re right… (almost teary) I’m sorry…

KENSUKE: …

SISTER: (with a sudden change of tone) Just kidding. Is that what you think I’ll say?

KENSUKE: Eh…?

SISTER: You’re too naïve, Ken-chan! Yeah, I sent your audition form on my own but didn’t Mom and Dad tell you that it’s your choice in the end if you wanna join the agency?!

SISTER: You said that you’ll do your best, enter the industry, and become a sentai hero someday, didn’t you~? You even declared it to Grandma and Grandpa, didn’t you?

SISTER: I was liiiiiisteniiiing properly~! (scoffs) No. I even have video proof, got it?

KENSUKE: For real?!

SISTER: For real! You wanna see it right now?

SISTER: I wonder how it’d go if you blame others for things not going too well when you declared yourself that you’ll be a hero someday, huh?

KENSUKE: (groans)

SISTER: Plus! So what if you got laughed at a little? Just tell them, “Yeah, I think I’m cool. What about it?” You’re so lame!

KENSUKE: Don’t force me to say that! I’m not as confident as you!

SISTER: If you’re not then train for it! I’m sure you can do it! You’re aiming to be a hero, right?! FIGHT!

KENSUKE: Hero, you say… They usually have a secret identity so I won’t know if they’re really strong-hearted, ya know?!

KENSUKE: Plus, it’s impossible to train my confidence! Impossible, I tell you! Just like with me and the piano!

KENSUKE: There are things that humans can and can’t face and mine is the piano!

KENSUKE: Listening to it is fine but playing it is impossible! I can dance somewhat so that’s fine! See ya! (Ken runs away)

SISTER: AAAHHHH!! WAIT, YOU! Don’t run away, Ken-chan! (she chases after him)

KENSUKE: I love music. I love singing and dancing, too. But, I’ve always been bad at playing instruments.

KENSUKE: I know that my simple love for music isn’t enough to give it shape [with an instrument] and I kinda disliked that.

KENSUKE: Normally, it would be possible if I just practiced but I wonder why I kept thinking that I couldn’t do it.

KENSUKE: My complicated feelings about music are still the same.

KENSUKE: It’s sort of like an unrequited love.

KENSUKE: I love it but it hates me. Or… hm… I wish it didn’t hate me though.

KENSUKE: Well, that’s our kinda relationship anyway.

  ==END==

※ Please don’t re-post these translations without permission.

#growth #growth translations #my translations #drama cd #tsukipro #i love ken's sister lol #who's her seiyuu #i have a mighty need to know!!! #also mamoru's flashback is so cute~ #i love how a piano version of kuusou no retro plays in the background~

[ryukoishida]

QZGS|The King’s Avatar Fic: In which something nice happens to our birthday boy.

Title: Ágúst Fandom: The King’s Avatar / Quan Zhi Gao Shou Character(s)/Pairing(s): YuHuang Summary: Since his birthday happens during the summer break, Huang Shaotian is used to spending this day by himself, receiving messages and mailed gifts from his teammates and other pro-player friends in the Alliance. And without fail, his captain will always be the first to wish him a happy birthday, but this year seems a little different. [Takes place during the summer between S9 and S10] Part: 1/1 Rating: PG-13 A/N: Gasp. Me, writing something in canon-verse? Amazing. Literally just… mindless, cheesy fluff. Happy birthday to our beloved chatty Sword Saint! And happy birthday to @andthenabanana~

Writing Commission | Editing & Translation Services

---

[Flowing Cloud]: Happy birthday, Huang Shao! Did you receive the package I sent you???

[Troubling Rain]: Thx, Xiao Lu! And yeah i did… Speaking of which, how do u figure im gonna finish all those snacks by myself, kid?!

A few days ago, the famed Sword Saint of Team Blue Rain had received an express delivery parcel from an unknown address in Taiwan: a giant box of local snack varieties from the team’s young swordsman. Placed atop of the rainbow packages of Kaui Che pork and beef jerky, fruit jellies, honey layer cakes, sugar and spice nougats, pineapple cakes, and for some strange reason, Alishan tea leaves, was a birthday card — and not just any plain, ol’ greeting card either. The brat had chosen the kind that played obnoxiously loud tinkling rendition of “Happy Birthday to You” when the receiver flipped open the card.

Huang Shaotian quickly snapped the card shut and winced at the horrid echo of the melody that had sounded especially strident in his quiet apartment, and one corner of his lips couldn’t help but lift upward into a heartfelt smile.

[Troubling Rain]: i cant stop eating those pineapple cakes and this is all ur fault, so u better buy more and bring them to the dorm after summer break! And whats up with the tea leaves? Im not captain, u know I dont drink that bitter stuff :(

[Flowing Cloud]: The tea is my mom’s contribution, I swear! Maybe you can give them to captain if you really don’t want it?

[Troubling Rain]: well…. in that case, thank ur mom for me, ok?

[Flowing Cloud]: Will do! ;) Anyway, I have to go now.

[Troubling Rain]: aight. And thx again for the present and card!

Popping one of the mango-flavoured fruit jellies into his mouth, Huang Shaotian exited the private message window he was using while texting Lu Hanwen, and scrolled back up the chat log in the Blue Rain group chat, where members had been posting about their summer adventures in the forms of (sometimes rather “artistically” blurry) photographs featuring either gorgeous sceneries of foreign countries or delicious food they’d found. In between the envious ooh-ing and fascinated aah-ing at the colourful photos were members discussing the transfers during the summer window, various Glory-related rumors and news, and other things that only reclusive young men who spent most of their days playing games on their computers were interested in.

Though most of them hailed from different parts of Guangdong, so they’d return home to visit their families and take the time to rest until the new season began in September, a few of them still found the energy and time to take a nice vacation with their friends or family and travel abroad after an intense month-and-a-half of spending hours fighting level 75 Wild Bosses and gathering rare materials in the online game.

Lu Hanwen, for example, was currently enjoying a brief but lovely trip in Taiwan with his parents. Having debuted at such a young and tender age, Lu Hanwen had missed out on a lot of experiences that teenagers his age usually encountered; he had also undergone a lot of pressure and scrutiny that kids his age usually didn’t have to suffer through — this past season had taught him that the hard way.  

On the trip back to Guangzhou, with his eyes still bloodshot from the frustrated tears that he’d wiped dry just a few minutes ago, Lu Hanwen promised both his captain and vice-captain that he would train hard over the summer so that he would not make such mistakes during team matches again.

Before Huang Shaotian could open his mouth, Xu Jingxi was already ruffling the teenager’s hair from the seat behind, which earned him an indignant ‘hey!’ from Lu Hanwen but laughter from the rest of the team.

“It’s okay,” Yu Wenzhou had said, his smile gentle, his gaze calm but warm. “You already did really well, Hanwen, so take your time over the summer to recover and return for another year of hard work come September.”

Since they knew the kind of boy Lu Hanwen was, Yu Wenzhou had made sure to give Lu Hanwen’s parents a call as well.  

And it seemed like the kid was enjoying himself with his family.

Huang Shaotian paused when he saw the photos that Yu Wenzhou had posted late last night. Most of the photos he’d taken were breathtaking nature sceneries: mountain ridges still coated with a layer of snow at the peaks, flat surface of a lake reflecting sapphire and jade specks surrounded by lush forests; only one or two photos featured Yu Wenzhou himself, and even then, those pictures were taken with an unsteady hand, but Huang Shaotian could still appreciate his wind-swept hair and smiling lips — a little more open and carefree than the one he always wore in front of the journalists, a little more careless — amidst the shards of shadows that fell around him from the foliage above.

He mentioned that he was travelling to the west coast of Canada to visit some relatives that had immigrated to Vancouver quite some years ago, and his cousins had taken him to all sorts of local places to hike and camp. It was a fact known by many other pro-players and the fanbase of Blue Rain that Yu Wenzhou, despite his delicate and refined appearance that he displayed before the public, was surprisingly an outdoorsy type; one wouldn’t assume so from the fact that he was the captain of an eSports team who presumably spent a lot of his time indoors, but that’d never stopped him from visiting the closest national park for a half-day hike or going on a two-week long camping trip in the mountainous region of Yunnan.  

With an impatient sigh, Huang Shaotian scrolled back to the most recent messages in the group chat, but what he was seeking was simply not there. He couldn’t help but feel the immense heaviness in his heart grew a little degree more; he bit his lower lip and considered sending the other man a message but almost immediately decided against that.

He slammed his phone into the pillow beside him and dived face-down into the mattress with a muffled groan that sounded like a slowly-dying animal. He couldn’t do this anymore. He couldn’t stand this anymore.

Fuck.

Yes, he liked Yu Wenzhou.

No, not as friends or teammates or bros or anything like that. What were we — still elementary school kids?

No. Huang Shaotian more than liked Yu Wenzhou; he was in love with the guy, all right? He wanted to hold his hand, and embrace him, and kiss him, and… and yes, sleep with him. He wanted to do all those wonderful, wonderful things with Yu Wenzhou but there was only one problem: Yu Wenzhou didn’t know anything about this and Huang Shaotian didn’t know how to tell him without scaring his captain away.

Every year, without fail, Yu Wenzhou would be the first person to send him birthday wishes. In most of those instances, he’d be out of town, so birthday wishes would come in various forms: a mailed card, a text, a voice recording, or even a thoughtful little souvenir from wherever he’d been travelling to. But August 10th was almost over, and other than the small set of photos he’d uploaded onto the team group chat yesterday, Yu Wenzhou’s username and icon remained disappointingly grey in his friend list.

It was 11:46pm when the doorbell to his apartment unit rang with an urgent flair, effectively pulling Huang Shaotian out of his dreary reverie.

He wasn’t expecting any guests at this hour, though it wouldn’t be the first time that a few of his teammates, along with a few close friends from the Alliance, who apparently had nothing better to do than to drop by Guangzhou and pester him (i.e. giving him a surprise birthday party, which, despite his mumbling and grumbling, he actually appreciated), showed up at his door without as much as a text ahead of time.

What he hadn’t expect to find was one Yu Wenzhou, a timeworn suitcase sitting by his feet and a hefty duffle bag on his shoulder. It looked like he’d been rushing to get here, for his breathing was still unsteady and his sweat-stained, ink-black hair was plastered messily over his forehead and stuck to the nape of his neck.

“C-Captain? W-What are you—”

“Did I make it in time?” Yu Wenzhou asked, his brows suddenly dipping in concern, and when he didn’t get an answer from his vice-captain, he added, “my phone battery was dead on the flight back.”

“What? In time for what?” Huang Shaotian was still bewildered; he still couldn’t believe that Yu Wenzhou — who was supposed to be in the wilderness somewhere in the west coast of North America roasting marshmallows over a bonfire or hunting bears or whatever it was that they did when people went camping — that Yu Wenzhou was currently standing in his doorway.

He blinked once, twice, speechless.

“Shaotian…” Yu Wenzhou reached over and touched him gingerly on the shoulder. “Your birthday. Did I come back in time for your birthday?”

Oh.

“It’s not midnight yet,” Huang Shaotian replied numbly, at least the last time he checked, which wasn’t that long ago, actually.

“Great!” Yu Wenzhou heaved a relieved sigh, and then with a softer smile and a warm gaze that was similar to the usual one he gave his teammates —but it was slightly off, yet Huang Shaotian was still too stunned by his captain’s sudden appearance that he couldn’t quite comprehend the expression that seemed so obvious when he thought back upon it later on — he said, “in that case, happy birthday, Shaotian.”

“T-Thank you,” Huang Shaotian lowered his head to hide the flush that’d suddenly bloomed across his cheeks, realizing that for once, he couldn’t look directly into Yu Wenzhou’s eyes. He was afraid of discovering what lay within those ink-blue depths; he was scared that he’d see something wonderful there only to find out that it was all in his imagination, his misinterpretation, a misunderstanding. Then, his logic — being lost somewhere between his fretful phone-scrolling and Yu Wenzhou’s unannounced arrival — finally caught up. “Wait, wait a fucking minute, hold on for just a second. W-what the hell are you even doing here, Captain? Aren’t you supposed to be in, like, the mountains strumming a guitar and singing songs around a campfire or something?”

Yu Wenzhou raised a brow, one corner of his lips tucked upwards into an amused grin, “I’m absolutely tone-deaf, Shaotian, or don’t you remember?”

Good lord, of course he remembered, Huang Shaotian winced visibly at the reminder. The one time their whole team decided to celebrate someone’s birthday at a karaoke was the last time they did so, because everyone belatedly discovered that, as soon as their captain, who was known to have a gentle, mesmerizing speaking voice, started opening his mouth to sing the first verse of Eason Chan’s famous ballad “Ten Years”, they all wished they’d brought some earplugs with them, even if it meant disrespecting (or insulting) their nice, kind captain.

“Okay, okay, fine, that wasn’t actually even the point. The point is—"

“Shaotian…” Yu Wenzhou interrupted softly with a helpless smile that was enough to stop the other man in the middle of his rant.

“Uh, yes?” Huang Shaotian halted, eyes widening a little.

“Aren’t you going to let me in?”

“Oh. Oh! Yeah, yeah come on in!” His blush deepened, but he turned around quickly to shuffle over and make space for Yu Wenzhou to step into his apartment. After setting his bags and shoes down at the entranceway, Yu Wenzhou made his way to the couch in the living-room, his manner casual as if he’d been here many times, felt comfortable enough to make himself at home on his vice-captain’s couch.

“You want something to drink?” Huang Shaotian was already walking towards the tiny kitchen he barely used, and without waiting for Yu Wenzhou to reply, he muttered, “I’ll get you something to drink. Uh, let’s see, what do I have in here?”

Some rummaging and a yelped curse later — presumably in his haste, he’d accidentally hit his head on something — Huang Shaotian came out with two bottles of beverage.

When Yu Wenzhou glanced over, he couldn’t help but let a corner of his lips curved up into an amused smile. For whatever reason, Huang Shaotian was currently acting like as if he was the uninvited guest, maneuvering carefully around his own home like the floor was covered in glass and he was trying not to startle the man sitting in his living-room. He placed the two bottles of peach-flavored black tea onto the coffee table and sat down gingerly beside Yu Wenzhou, taking special precaution to leave a good amount of space between them.

“You don’t seem too happy to see me, Shaotian,” Yu Wenzhou observed, picking up the bottle easily and twisting the cap off to take a sip of the artificially sweetened iced tea.

“That’s crazy talk, captain! Of course I’m happy to see you — I’m absolutely thrilled to see you!” Huang Shaotian stuttered, and decided that now was a good time to drink his tea as well, but his hands were shaking so much that it took him a few seconds before he could grip the cap properly. He gulped down the liquid as if his life depended on it, and when half of the tea had been consumed, his nerves seemed to have returned as well. He sighed, looking away, and murmured, “I was just — I didn’t expect to see you here, of all places, this late at night, is all. You could’ve said something, you know? I could’ve come to the airport to pick you up.”

“Then it wouldn’t be a surprise anymore, now would it?”

A soft hint of laugher was laced within Yu Wenzhou’s low voice, like the softest breeze ruffling through the summer flower fields — sweet and sensual.

“N-No, I guess not.”

It was the voice that caressed his heart late at night, when his dreams were consumed by the images of the man he’d grown up with — from awkward teenagers who competed with each other for a spot in the team to partners standing side-by-side, protecting each other’s backs, creating opportunities for each other to attack and invade and win — and those images had been strange yet mesmerizing. The slow fumbling fingers on the keyboard that everyone in the Alliance teased about were elegant and left spots of sparks on his bare skin, his smiling lips against the curve of his ear, his neck, his teeth sinking into his supple skin and leaving marks on his hips and the insides of his thighs, his heated breaths mixing with Huang Shaotian’s gasps, ragged and fragmented syllables of their names falling from their parted lips…

Huang Shaotian didn’t remember when he’d first started having these indecent dreams about his captain, but as much as he hated himself for having them in the first place, he couldn’t let the sensations disappear once he woke up; he couldn’t let him go.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t the first person to wish you happy birthday,” Yu Wenzhou began once more after he put the bottle of tea down, his voice slightly strained with regret as he returned his gaze towards Huang Shaotian.  

“Why should you be sorry—” Huang Shaotian snapped his head up and stared directly at the other man, his topaz eyes widened with puzzlement.

“Because I want to spend every birthday with you, Shaotian, and I want to always be the first person to wish you a happy birthday,” Yu Wenzhou smiled up at him, as if the statement that just came out of his mouth was a casual, harmless comment about the weather, like it was the most apparent, most genuine sentiment in the world. He tilted his head slightly to the side so that his dark forelocks fell into his eyes, his cheeks tinting just the faintest shade of pink, his smile soft, his voice softer, “is that not obvious?”

“I—I…”

At the back of his mind, Huang Shaotian thought he knew he understood the meaning of each word, but when stringed together like this, when Yu Wenzhou — the man he respected so much as the team’s captain, the friend he treasured so much over the years of ups and downs in their career, the boy he gradually learned to admire though he’d refused to admit this when he was younger, more stubborn — when he spoke to him like this, it was difficult for Huang Shaotian to understand anything.

His mind was buzzing, rearranging the words to make sense out of them, and when it finally clicked, blood roared in his ears, tainting his cheeks red. Everything else in his brain was lost and drowned out by only one, single thought: Yu Wenzhou likes me, he likes me, he likes me, he likes me…

“Y-You’re not playing fair, Yu Wenzhou!”

“They do say those who use tactics have dirty hearts,” Yu Wenzhou’s smile grew a little bolder, a little more mischievous. He shuffled closer, and Huang Shaotian could do nothing but be captivated by the almost animalistic, hungry look in Yu Wenzhou’s eyes — an emotion he’d never seen before, an emotion he dared not fantasize about because it was too dangerous, too damn dangerous — and it wasn’t until his back hit the stiff armrest of his couch that he realized that Yu Wenzhou had successfully trapped him in between his arms.

He leaned forward until their foreheads were touching lightly, their breaths mingling — shallow, hot, irresistible.

There was nowhere for him to escape, but he didn’t want to, Huang Shaotian thought, he’d been running for years now, and he wanted to stop, to rest, to find his way home.

Yu Wenzhou’s eyes held only him, and him alone, and Huang Shaotian felt his heart beating beneath his ribs, beating so hard he was afraid Yu Wenzhou might hear it, might tease him for it, but then Yu Wenzhou was holding his hand and guiding it so that his palm was lying flat against the left side of his chest, and Yu Wenzhou’s heart was palpitating hard, too, like he’d been running for miles, for years.

And Huang Shaotian thought with a smile, gods we’d both been such idiots.

“So, Shaotian, what do you say? Will you let me?” Yu Wenzhou asked in a whisper, words branded on skin.

“Let you… what?” Huang Shaotian sounded weary. This may be a confession — one that he’d only dreamed too many times about in the past, it was true — but he hadn’t forgotten the fact that he was still dealing with one of the great tacticians of Glory.

“Let me accompany you on your birthdays in the years to come,” Yu Wenzhou answered easily, brushing the tip of his thumb gently across Huang Shaotian’s cheek, feeling the heat pooled there, his mesmerized gaze, the way his irises darkened at his touch.

“Only if your kissing skills are better than your terrible hand-speed,” Huang Shaotian challenged him with a shaky grin.

“You’re on,” Yu Wenzhou chuckled, and closed the distance between them with a kiss, too ready and keen to show Huang Shaotian what he was capable of.

This, Huang Shaotian decided faintly before he was entirely distracted by Yu Wenzhou’s consuming kisses, was the best birthday he could ever ask for.

#qzgs #quan zhi gao shou #tka #the king's avatar #yuhuang #huang shaotian #yu wenzhou #bowie's crappy writing

[roastyoualive-archive]

Meta meme: What was school like when he was younger? Was he bullied? An outcast? Was it hard to control his powers when he was younger as opposed to now?

send me a topic to write a meta about my muse on || ALWAYS Accepting

Well, now, that depends on what you mean by ‘when he was younger’. He was in third grade when his dad got arrested. But, before that, Warren was really a different person. He was never hugely outgoing, was never really an extrovert, but he was definitely- lighter. Not as weighed down by the world.

Happier.

When Warren first went to school, he attended Bayshore Public. It was a small but nice primary school not too far from the Peaces’ house on Pinegrove. He’d made a few friends in Sunny Hills (the daycare/pre-school he went to) who also attended Bayshore, so that helped. Some of them were even in his class! And his teacher was really nice, too. Mrs. Amanda Jenkins, an older woman who had done a lot of travelling in her youth. When she taught geography, she brought in little trinkets and souvenirs from all over the world for the kids to see, and she had ‘community projects’ where she’d get the kids to help with local fundraisers to build a well for a small village overseas. When she got a letter about and photograph of the well from the organisation she was working with, she showed it to the class and used it to show them not only how connected everyone was, but also how little good things can add up to a really big, really important good thing. 

By the end of that first year, Warren already had two best friends at Bayshore. Their names were Grant McGraw and Sam White. Grant and Warren had gone to Sunny Hills together, and had been friends for ‘ages’, as they’d put it (’maybe even forever!’). Sam hadn’t gone to Sunny Hills, but he HAD run up to Warren on the Bayshore playground, tapped his shoulder, and yelled ‘TAG - you’re it!’ before bounding away, and, well- They were little kids. That’s all it took. Grant, Warren, and Sam almost always shared a mat during Listening Time. They’d compete to see who could build the biggest block towers (Grant usually won) and debate over which truck was best (Warren usually voted for the red one, because it had the biggest and shiniest wheels. The other two agreed this was a very valid point) and how many LEGOs it would take to build a real rocket ship like the ones at NASA (Sam thought maybe twenty boxes, but only if it was Star Wars LEGOs). Sometimes, they’d go over to each others’ houses on the weekends. He always had to let Mama and Papa know early if he was going to have friends over. 

See, just like his dad, Warren got his powers very young. (Penny didn’t, and she was oddly grateful she’d had to wait for adolescence.) Baron and Penny knew they could mitigate Warren’s powers when they were around, but also knew they weren’t always going to be right there. So, ever since he’d first shown his powers, they’d drilled into his head that they were a secret. ‘Don’t use your powers in public’ was drilled into his head along with ‘don’t get in the car with strangers’ and ‘don’t run off where we can’t see you’. They’d explained as well that if people knew what he could do, they might have to move to a new house and a new school, and Warren didn’t like that idea, so he kept it under wraps. Every day after school, or after going out with his friends, Baron or Penny (whoever was closest when they got home) would ask him if he kept their secret. Whenever he said yes, he’d get a sticker, a treat, to stay up a bit later, or even a family movie night (Disney movies, usually). To help with this, when they had a moment, Baron would take Warren into the fireproof garage and let him use his powers as much as he wanted - even give him some pointers. He knew how awful it was to keep fire bottled up, and didn’t want that for Warren, so insisted he get some sort of outlet for it. Penny thought it was a great idea, as long as it was safe and supervised. They’d play games, experiment, or just burn as much energy as they could, to help naturally curb Warren’s desire to power up outside of home. So, thankfully, none of Warren’s friends knew, not even Grant and Sam. 

Of course, those two weren’t his only friends - just his best friends. There was also Lacy Chai - his future coworker, and the granddaughter of his future bosses (she helped him get the job). He stuck up for her once when she was being picked on, and that was that. They briefly got teased for ‘dating’, but that didn’t last long. Kids moved on. Mindy Fenter had the best coloured pencils, so everyone wanted to be her friend. She had a crush on Grant, and so let Sam and Warren use her colours too so he’d like her better. Ben Olsen was another Sunny Hills alumnus, and sometimes he and Warren traded snacks. Andy Walker was the funniest kid in class, so everyone liked him, and sometimes he’d play tag and keep-away and four-square with Sam and Warren and Grant. Jessie Sanderson was the best at monkey bars, and a few times she gave the three of them tips on how to do it better and the best ways to climb up to the very top - the part the grown-ups said they weren’t supposed to be on, but never really stopped them from sitting there once they got up. Grant’s older sister, Gina, would make them sandwiches when they were at Grant’s house and she was really nice, and Grant and Gina’s oldest brother Graham would set up games on his N64 and let the three of them play if they promised to be careful, so Warren considered them friends, too. But, not everyone was that nice. There was a bully in their year. His name was Ulysses Harper. He was the tallest in the class, but Warren was almost the same height as him (and ended up being taller, in later years), so for the most part, Ulysses left him alone. Besides, it’s easier to go after solo targets, and the Three Amigos were basically inseparable. (Interesting fact, Ulysses would go on to work as an [unpowered] petty thief for the Battalion, under the command of Saul Springfield, before staying a brief stint in juvie, re-inventing himself as a life coach and motivational speaker, and getting a teaching degree. He returned to Bayshore to teach fifth grade, and was known by all of the kids as one of the nicest teachers in school.)

I like to think that, in a world where Baron wasn’t arrested, it would have continued on like that. The three of them: Side, by side. … By side. They would’ve stayed best friends all throughout elementary school. They’d learn how to skateboard together, be on the same soccer teams over summer, and spend so much time at Livewire Arcade they’d be on a first-name basis with the owner (Vince Upton). They’d have snowball fights in winter and cram like sardines so they could all fit on one lift on the school ski trips (and almost get stuck at least once, almost fall off at least twice). They’d graduate together and be in at least five pictures in the end-of-year slideshow, cheesing it up like the doofuses young kids are supposed to be. They’d all go to Trinity Prep for middle school; Grant was technically outside of school limits, but he begged his parents enough to fill out the paperwork for it, and Gina (who was taking a few years off to help save up for college) agreed to drive him there in the morning, since it was on the way to her job, anyways. The three of them would have a sleepover at Sam’s to celebrate this (he had the biggest basement). Grant and Sam would convince Warren to audition for school plays, and Grant and Warren would convince Sam to go to football try-outs, and Sam and Warren would make sure to actually listen to announcements when Grant became the student council rep. (Another sleepover at Casa de Sam to celebrate this; his parents weren’t surprised anymore when Sam walked in with the other two trailing behind. None of their parents were.) Every Halloween, they’d go out together - coordinated costumes in later years - and pool their candy; Gifts were exchanged every Christmas, cards every Valentines’, and their parents had swapped so many recipes at Thanksgiving that nobody could remember who made what, most years. At one of Grant’s family Christmas parties, a Chipmunks special would come on, and the boys would manage to untie one of the helium balloons and laugh themselves to tears while their parents had wine and talked about whatever boring stuff grown-ups bothered with. Sam and Grant would be disappointed at Warren not going to the same high school as them, but offer a mixture of congratulations and ‘O most learned Lord Warren of Peacefordshire!’ jokes about him going to some fancy ‘private school’, and, of course, they’d agree to hang out over the summer and weekends. Sam and Grant would go to the Lantern to pester him (He’d still work there, just not as often), they’d get together in Warren’s back yard (the biggest of the three) or the park behind Bayshore to play rugby (Sam was best at it, so Grant enlisted Graham - studying to be a gym teacher - for help, and eventually they got enough local kids in to make an unofficial ‘team’), and for a week every summer they’d drive up to Grant’s folks’ cottage to just hang out. It’d be during one of these week-long getaways that Warren would reveal his powers to his friends. They were only upset that he’d waited so long to tell them, and thought it was SO COOL that their best friend was a SUPERHERO, and also, WOW, the fire thing really made your dog’s name make sense (’So THAT’S where ‘Matchstick’ came from! Can’t believe we never figured it out.’ ‘... Yeah, because ‘super powers’ is the obvious conclusion.’). It was also during one of these stays that Sam and Warren would share their first kiss. Grant was a little awkward about being a third wheel, but got over it before that trip was even over. He’d say to Warren, ‘Hey, Sam’s my brother. Don’t hurt him.’ And before Warren could respond turn and say to Sam, ‘Hey, Warren’s my brother. Don’t–’ ‘He’s a superhero, Grantwell, how the hell do I-’ ‘You know what I mean, Sammy!’ and then it’d dissolve into a wrestling match-turned-water fight when the super soakers get brought out. Sam and Warren would take a brief (amicable) break from dating during senior year, but would get together again after only a week or two when they figured they didn’t need to see who else was out there and experimenting wasn’t for them. They’d have a graduation party at Grant’s new place (now HE had the bigger downstairs, Sammy! / That’s dirty, Grantwell / Guys shut UP my mom is RIGHT THERE / Oh sh– Hi, Mrs. P!) and crash on the couch/floor/wherever they felt like. They’d do donuts in the now-vacant parking lot of Livewire when Baron and Penny buy Warren a car as his grad gift and do rock-paper-scissors to decide who got to pick the radio station, next. They’d see every High School Musical movie when it came out without knowing why they enjoyed them so much. Warren would go off to university, as would the others, but they’d stay in contact, and whenever he had time off, he’d be back at Maxville with them. They’d help each other study for tests and surprise the others by driving up to their respective dorms with food (’Pizza delivery!’ ‘This is the weirdest damn pizza I’ve ever seen.’ ‘Shut up, Warhead, I did my best.’ ‘It’s a salad.’ ‘… A pizza’s a kind of salad.’ ‘You’re such a moron. C’mon in.’ ‘Apologize to the pizza first.’). Sam and Grant would buy tickets to Warren’s graduation. (He returned the favour and attended both of theirs, too. They all have three graduation photos on their dressers, each with the three of them in a different school and an only slightly different pose.) When it became legal, Warren and Sam would get married. Nobody would be surprised. Penny would cry, Baron would make a speech that was, quite frankly, much less threatening than people would expect from a former supervillain, Grant would be best man and use all of the vocational skills he learned in middle school to make the best speech he could and pretend he wasn’t getting misty-eyed, just a little drunk. He’d fool nobody. Grant would marry a girl he met at college, Francisca ‘Fran’ Lowell-McGraw, and they’d have two daughters: Ginger (’Ginny’) and Clementine (’Clem’), both of whom would be absolutely spoiled by Uncles Warren and Sam. They’d be walking home from the gym one night when Grant suddenly remembers and lets them know that, hey, guess who’s Clem’s teacher this year? Ulysses! … The one we went to school with– Yes, I’m sure, how many guys named ‘Ulysses’ do you know? And then they’d get in contact with him. He’d apologize for being a jerk when they were kids, they’d tell him dude, that was like, thirty years ago, it’s cool, and they’d all go for drinks at Callahan’s, the bar that had opened in the same spot Livewire used to be. Dr. Warren Peace, practicing psychologist, would get a call to go deal with ‘some problems’ that Grant McGraw, local radio host, and Sam Peace, foreman of a construction crew, would have rehearsed excuses for (’Oh, man. Did the office server shut down AGAIN?’ ‘You really gotta get an IT guy on that, babe.’) before he ducked out to let the vigilante super Hellraiser make an appearance and keep Maxville safe. He’d live a pretty normal life for a super, and he’d be happy. 

But, as we all know, that didn’t happen. Baron didn’t get to retire. Warren’s life was far from normal. And Warren wasn’t happy. 

Baron was arrested just before Warren’s seventh birthday. Literally, the day before. It took a bit of time for it all to sink in. What do you mean, Dad’s not coming home? Dad always comes home! He’s probably just at work, or on another business trip, like the one he went on last year with Uncle Saul, or- Or maybe he’s getting a really BIG present and it’s just taking a while to get here! He’ll be back, Mama. Just you wait. 

And wait Warren did. 

Every day, by the door. He’d bring his snacks there, books, toys, anything to while the hours away. He just had to be there when Dad got home. Didn’t want to miss it. And that started cutting in to after-school hang-outs with his friends. Nah, he can’t go to Sam’s pool party, sorry, guys. It’s okay, though, ‘cause he’s not that good a swimmer, anyway. He doesn’t wanna go to Grant’s tree-house for ghost stories. He doesn’t wanna go play tag. He doesn’t even want to be in school, and it was getting hard to focus when he was there. He just wants his Dad back. So he waits. It was about two weeks before it started to sink in that Baron was Gone. Another week and a half before Warren fully realized it. He didn’t really understand why at the time. Sure, people tried to explain it to him, but it didn’t make sense. They kept telling him dad was a bad person, and that wasn’t true. They were lying. Dad had always been a good dad. A great dad, even. And he always came home. But not this time.

Losing a parent is hard. It’s even worse when you’re young. Warren was a mess of emotions as he struggled with his father’s arrest. Anger, confusion, fear, grief, maybe even some guilt. He didn’t know how to explain or communicate any of this, though. He was seven. And kids can be cruel. When Ulysses smelled blood in the water, he pounced. Boys aren’t supposed to cry, Warren. What are you, some kind of wimp? A sissy? A baby? Why don’t you go crying home to mommy and daddy, huh? … That was the first time Warren got into a fight. It was also the first time Ulysses Harper, age seven, had the fear of God put into him. Nobody had been around to see it. Ulysses had been class bully for two years, now, and had long since learned to make sure the grown-ups were away before picking his victims. So nobody could really explain how those burns got on his shoulders. Most people just assumed that Warren had to have shoved Ulysses into one of the heaters. Penny knew better, of course, and had plenty of time to talk to Warren about it, seeing as he got suspended for a few days. He protested this. It wasn’t his fault! He hadn’t started it, and he hadn’t meant to-! Penny did the best she could to hear him out, but have a serious talk about proper use of powers. Warren was only half-listening. There was too little notice to book a sitter for the days he was out of school, so he spent most of the time sulking behind his mom’s desk while she was at work. Not much to do there except read (which he normally liked, but wasn’t in the mood for), colour (which he couldn’t focus on), or think. He had a lot to think about. He thought about how unfair the punishment was. He thought about how much he was starting to hate school. He thought about how much he missed his dad. … He thought a lot about his dad. Everyone seemed convinced he was a bad person. Warren didn’t think he was bad. In fact, he’d been Warren’s hero. Warren had wanted to be just like him when he grew up. … Did that make him a bad person, too? Penny tried to assure him that it didn’t, but everybody else seemed to think so. He could tell. 

It was obvious, after all, especially at school, when he finally went back. Teachers were a bit more tight-lipped around him. Kids gave him a wider berth. Grant and Sam were unsure of how to handle it. They noticed the change in their friend, of course. They were children, and kids are often much smarter than we tend to give them credit for. But they were only in second grade. They didn’t know words like ‘trauma’ and ‘depression’. Nobody had thought they’d need to. They were only in second grade. They didn’t know why Warren was so upset. They tried to talk to him a few times. Even tried to invite him to play with them. But he didn’t do much talking in return, and even snapped at them, once. (Felt awful for it immediately after, but the damage was done). Parents were less inclined to invite him to their houses after news of the Ulysses incident spread. Though he never got up in Warren’s face again, Ulysses was in fact guilty of contributing to the whispers that circulated the lunch hall. It was these whispers - and the stares - that made Warren not want to eat with the other kids. He’d usually spend lunch hiding in the library or the washrooms. He never let anyone see him cry again. When people started getting louder in their jeers, he’d turn on them until they learned to keep their words hidden away behind his back. He still heard them. Everyone knew what they said about Warren Peace. That kid was trouble. Dangerous. Good-for-nothing. He’d end up in juvie someday, if he was lucky. What a shame. His poor mother. 

The thing about hearing that sort of thing often enough is, eventually, you start to believe it, yourself. So, Warren did. Penny tried to convince him otherwise. She told him she loved him, and not to listen to them, that she was proud of who he was and how strong he was being and that no matter what anybody said, he was a good person. That didn’t stop him from blaming himself when they lost the house. He’d given away their secret, after all. 

Moving around so much didn’t help things, any. The shelters and apartments he and Penny ended up into were usually in less-than-nice areas of town and brought with them a lot of noise and chaos. School became the only ‘peace’ he got. So, even if people tried so socialize with him (they didn’t), he wouldn’t want any part of it. He wanted to have some time to breathe, and read, and sleep during breaks. Even if people wanted to invite him over or hang out after school (they didn’t), he wouldn’t be able to have them at his place, and he didn’t really have the transportation to get around, any more. When he got involved with the school lunch programs, new whispers got thrown in. He was the Poor Kid, now. People started turning their noses up at him. One kid - Jack Osgood, who’d transferred to Bayshore in fifth grade - thought it would be hilarious to knock his lunch tray out of his hands. Warren, who had never said a word to Jack, had hardly even looked at him, but who had been looking forwards to that ham sandwich and Minute Maid (meat and juice are expensive), punched him in the jaw so hard Jack fell into Becky Lowell, and then the lunch room was chaos. Warren got another detention. He didn’t get another lunch. The teachers didn’t care who started it or why. They never did. Warren had learned pretty early that he had to deal with this stuff, himself. Trying to get help from the faculty only ever made things worse. So, he explained what happened to his mom, when she finally showed up, and only really felt bad for disappointing her. Well, and for making Becky spill her fruit punch. No, he hadn’t wanted to get into a fight with Jack. He didn’t want to hurt anyone. He just wanted to be left alone. ... And his sandwich. Of course, teachers didn’t see it, that way. Neither did the other kids. Safe to say, Warren had just ruined his chances of making any friends at Bayshore. At least people did leave him alone, after that. Jack had a bruise for more than a week that reminded people why that was a good idea. Warren didn’t care. They’d be graduating soon, anyways. (Nobody signed his year book. Not even Mr. Richards, the homeroom teacher. Warren threw it in the recycling on the way home.)

When he was twelve, Lacy got him a job at the Paper Lantern. Warren’s still not sure what possessed her to reach out to him. They weren’t exactly friends. She was a bubbly socialite, on the mathlete and cheer squads. He was the guy nobody wanted to be anywhere near, and he couldn’t afford extra-curriculars. In reality, Lacy felt bad for him. She didn’t think he was as bad as people said. She still remembered when he stuck his neck out for her way back in first grade. Sure, she didn’t get what he was going through, but she wanted to help, so she offered him a job. Warren was twelve, and had spent the last five years learning how to best live off food stamps and minimal cash. He’d seen how stressed mom was. ... He felt like a lot of that was his fault. So, of course he took her up on the offer. She made a case to her grandparents, and he was hired as a dishwasher. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and about all he could do at that age. He’d also realized that he’d probably never get into college without a scholarship. They’d never be able to afford it. Not in a million years. And he’d decided long ago what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to be a psychologist, and he wanted to help people. You need a degree for that. So, when Warren wasn’t at school, he was working (Up to forty hours a week, by the time he’s a teenager). When he wasn’t working, he’d be studying. Sometimes, he’d even bring his books to the ‘Lantern, and be reading while he was up to his elbows in soap suds and dirty flatware. The people at the local library knew him well, but, that was about it as far as new relationships. A schedule like that doesn’t leave a lot of time for socializing. 

Warren graduated Bayshore without much fanfare. He moved on to Trinity Prep middle school. ‘Go, Titans’. By this point, Warren was growing his hair out. He was wearing his typical darker colour scheme. Black was easier to keep clean, and didn’t catch soot and smoke stains as easily. Black was also always in ready supply at the second-hand stores. And, as a bonus, it reinforced an image that kept people at bay. Sam went to Trinity, too, but he and Warren hadn’t really spoken in years. (Grant ended up going to Our Lady of Providence, a Catholic middle school. His family wasn’t religious, but, hey, it was closer and had a better computer sciences program, which is what his parents wanted him to go into, so.) In a way, Warren was glad for the new school. Not as many people knew him, here. Not as many people cared. Warren appreciated the isolation. The breathing room. Work was busy. He and his mom still hadn’t found an apartment that stuck (but they were getting close). He didn’t mean to keep setting off the fire alarms. He got better with his powers as the years went by. It was a struggle, though. Yes, Penny was an elemental, too, but she did water and wind (mainly water), not fire. He had to figure a lot of things out for himself. They’d always thought Baron would be the one to teach his son how to control his pyrokinesis, but, of course, he wasn’t around to do that, any more. And the older Warren got, the more he was starting to learn why that was. It was really-- Polarizing for him, if that’s the word I’m looking for. Now, I could write a doctoral thesis on Warren’s feelings about his dad, and how weird it is for him and how it probably would have been better, almost, if Baron had been a horrible father and made Warren hate him from the get-go, but this is about Warren’s school life and (lack of) friends, so I’ll just say it became even more of a touchy subject than before. 

One of the many things Trinity had that Bayshore didn’t was Career Day. 

Warren had been dreading it since it had first been announced. He knew Mom wouldn’t be able to take time off to come in. And, Dad? Warren hadn’t seen him in almost six years. It’d be a damn miracle if he turned up for it. Probably a federal crime, too. So he didn’t bother telling Mom about it. He didn’t want her feeling guilty about it - she had enough to worry about. He managed to slip away when everyone else was filing into class after the first break, and snuck off campus. For the next hour, he wandered idly around the neighbourhood. Nobody tried to stop him. He was always tall for his age and old for his youth, and that - combined with his perpetual scowl - made people pay him no mind. A typical delinquent. Of course he wasn’t in school. Best keep your distance. He returned to school about an hour later, and when the teacher (Josephine LaRose) asked where he was, he shrugged and told her he’d just not been feeling well. As always, the other kids started to talk. Some of them said he’d ditched to smoke, others to sell drugs. And his parents hadn’t shown up! Oh, the rumours that flew, then. In any other setting than a public school, they could’ve been called slander. Nobody ever said anything to his face, though. Gossip had spread from some of the Bayshore alumni, and as gossip tended to do, it had been embellished and enhanced until the other kids were terrified of Warren. They didn’t want to end up drinking their burgers through a straw like Jack Osgood, after all. (Jack, for the record, had never needed to liquefy his food. He was totally fine over at Westwood Middle School, and barely remembered ever meeting Warren Peace.) So Warren only heard whispers in passing. Usually, a glare and a ‘what was that?’ was enough to shut them up. He didn’t really care if they were talking about him. Let them talk. He was used to it. But nobody knew his father like he did (and, given that these kids weren’t in the super community, they didn’t know him at all) and heaven help anyone he caught speaking ill of his mother. She had enough to deal with without some snot-nosed punk speculating about how she earned a living. He didn’t regret scaring those kids, nor did he care about the lectures he got as a result. Leave him alone, leave her alone, and he’d leave them alone. He thought it was fair. Honestly, if it wasn’t for his 4.0 average (which all of the teachers were sure had to be a mistake) making the school’s test scores look good, they probably would have expelled him. It wasn’t even that he got into that many fights - he didn’t, not really. You could count the number of actual physical altercations he got into on one hand and have fingers left over. He was never disruptive in class. Never talked back to the teachers (or really talked at all, if he didn’t have to). Always turned in his homework completed and on time. But- He was a bad kid. Just look at him. He’s Trouble, capital T, and the sooner he got out of that school, the better for everyone else. 

And he did get out. 

He graduated Trinity Prep and skipped the convocation. Went to work, instead. Rent Day was coming up. After a lot of moving around, eventually, a letter would arrive telling him he got into an exclusive high school, but- We’ve all seen how that worked out for him, so, for now, I’ll end this here.

#personifiedchaosx #;school gossip (ａｓｋｓ) #;extinguished (ｏｕｔ ｏｆ ｃｈａｒａｃｔｅｒ) #;student record (ｈｅａｄｃａｎｏｎｓ) #thank you!!!! ;w; #bullying tw // #violence tw // #ask to tag

[christimesteele]

Transcript - Time Talks Ep 37 - Felicia Rose Chavez on Poetry, Dismantling Patriarchy, Anti-Racist Writing Workshops, Mutualism, Building Power, and Grief

chris time steele  00:06

Welcome to Episode 37 of the Time Talks podcast part of the channel zero network. This month I had the opportunity to speak to Felicia Rose Chavez, along with being an educator and professor, Chavez is an activist, writer and author of the book The Anti Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative C lassroom. In this episode, Felicia Rose Chavez spoke about poetry, dismantling patriarchy, anti racist writing workshops, mutualism, building power and grief. Thank you to awareness for the music. And here's a brief jingle by fellow channel zero network member.

 Silverthreads 00:41

still walking, still waking is co hosted by me carla bergman, and me Eleanor Goldfield. This is where we interview long term organizers and radicals about their watershed moments, what they've learned along the way and how they maintain their hope on this path, dreaming and building emergent worlds for a present and future anchored in justice and freedom for all because there are forks in the road. But they all lead us home to the fight to the build

 chris time steele  01:38

You wrote about the influence of June Jordan's Poetry for the People. I wanted to read an excerpt from it because I feel your book does this just so much as well and your writing. I read all of your, most of your short stories and essays that I could find online as well which were just so powerful. She writes, "poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair and build revolution in which speaking, and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter." And building on top of this, I was wondering if you could speak on a transformational moment. I don't know if this goes back to when you went to Albuquerque Academy, or after it or before or maybe it's a process, a moment that radicalized you to interrogate the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy further, but to also fight against it, but also building outside of it?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  02:48

That's a powerful question. I don't believe that it's any one moment. I mean, I think there are shocking moments that we lived through, that we can point to and remember, by the narrative that I've had the opportunity to reflect on is one of consistent lived experiences that I like to think of as splinters right, they just kind of splinter under the skin where you're like, something's not right about that. That's not, is it just me, am I being crazy? Am I being overly sensitive, or why being too critical? And it happens again, and again, and again, until something's just like so much in your face that you can't, you can't deny it anymore. And you have a choice to make, you know, do I, you know, shake my head walk away, talk about it later, rant privately with my friends, my parents, my partner, or do I take action against it. And I think it took me many, many years to finally commit to that action. First through proper channels. You know, like in graduate school, I was petitioning for change and working on academic committees, working with faculty to create my own class. And nothing happened as a result of that. I mean, it was a lot of extra labor with no real fruit. So it took me writing down my own experience on the page and being vulnerable, and saying, hey, you know, I'm going to I'm going to count these splinters, I'm going to take them out one by one. And that started as early as, you know, elementary school where you're like, ah, why am I being treated differently as a student of color, you know, and then throughout middle school in high school, as you said, I went to a private predominantly white school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And by that senior year, I was furious. The context of college changed everything. You know, when I when I saw how easily my peers kind of transitioned into higher education, as though it were all laid out for them. And it was, you know, it was it was predestined. And for me it was real work, something I had to kind of claw for, and hang on to. So, you know, I guess the ability to articulate what it is that was wrong, presented itself in my teenage years. But it wasn't until later in life in my in my 30s, really where I was able to put it down on the page in a way that felt like I was doing it justice.

 chris time steele  05:36

Your thoughts about that moment were really, blossoming. When you were in Iceland, going back to when you said, when you were in elementary school, I remember you mentioning, in the book or a talk when you handed your husband, something from the third grade, where you were really,

 Felicia Rose Chavez  05:54

He was like, really, we're going all the way back? And I'm like, yeah, we're going all the way back. But that experience of reading, the very earliest rendition of the book was a 10 minute speech, where I just spoke to what I experienced at the University of Iowa as an MFA graduate student in creative nonfiction writing. And then a list of practical strategies that I do now kind of pivoting, from the way I was taught and embracing a new way to teach creative writing in the classroom. And I cried during that speech I stood up and just cried and cried. Because I was saying it. I was, it was my testimony, I was testifying to the people I went to school with and the people who taught me they were in the room. And I was, I was really summoning the courage to say what I experienced out loud, I think so many of us don't, we don't have that opportunity to go back and say, listen, this is what happened to me here. And we need to change so that this doesn't happen again, to your current students and your future students, it was a powerful, powerful moment that I think emboldened me to move forward to write the book.

 chris time steele  07:12

And I really thought the Iceland story was so powerful, because you said in, in one moment, you were so emotional, and cried, because you felt like you were betraying some of these people. But at the same time, when you when you did that, you found that you had so many people on your side, you know, when people were passing around the paper and trying to dismantle the systems that you spoke about was so violent.

 Felicia Rose Chavez  07:39

That was the great surprise of this book. And it happened twice. So once in Iceland, where I'm sobbing, because I think, what are they going to say, you know, and then I get this glorious response as you said from, from both the people of color in the room and the white educators in the room who said, we don't want to, we don't want to replicate this sort of harm. So what can we do to help? You know, like, can we have a copy of your speech? Send it to us, you know, and I thought, well, I could do more than a speech, i'll write on this, I'll really give it everything I have. But in the process of writing, I can't tell you. I mean, it was two years of constant paranoia, I mean, really awful, agonizing moments, day and night, where not only am I dredging up, hard to confront moments from my past and trying to make art out of it, trying to make a message out of it. But at the same time, I'm thinking, this person from graduate school is going to call me a liar. This person who taught me is going to is going to, you know, say that I got it all wrong. This person, I mean, I just was constantly thinking of strategies of defensiveness and dismissiveness and denial that has been the signature moves of white supremacy throughout all of our lives, right throughout history, and so I thought how many people are going to shut this down before he even has a chance to speak to anyone? Luckily, before it was published, as we were in the editing phase, a group at the University of Iowa called Black at Iowa Writers came forward and started calling out faculty members by name, specifically one faculty member John Degotta(?) and spoke out against their unfair treatment in the nonfiction writing program. I wasn't hip to it, a friend kind of nudged me to check out this social media account and I cried and cried. Then too, I mean, just out of pure relief, that it was real, that this experience was shared, and that someone was bold enough to come out before me and do this work. And then in an, in a sense, hold my hand and walk me through the process so that I could be brave enough to do it next.

 chris time steele  10:08

Thank you for sharing that story. That's, that's really powerful. And it really shows you that when you have the courage to stand up, that others are going to stand with you, even though they feel so alone. And that vulnerable moment,

 Felicia Rose Chavez  10:20

Absolutely, they didn't know, no one knew that I was working on this manuscript, it wasn't like I kept in touch with the alumni committee. You know, like, you never know, you never know how your work is going to impact someone, how your story, just sharing it aloud, it's gonna impact someone to, to go on and share their own story. And that's the power in in storytelling, right. And so, that was such a relief for me to feel supported in that way and less isolated.

 chris time steele  10:55

I think, another part of your, your writing that has such a liberatory and powerful effect is that you call out these systems as they are by using bell hooks, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. It's, it's right out in the open is, it's not something that some writers try to hide it by talking about systems and things like this and something so refreshing about your work. And you explicitly tell your story, which I feel calls out patriarchy as well. You mentioned how a colleague had to leave, and someone said we don't want to mother, these students and I loved how you reformatted the language. And you made it so powerful of talking about how we are multitudes mothered again and again in rhythm and time. And you talk about in the piece Color Lines about the coop living situation and the racism and patriarchy you had to endure there. From your story, the Brown Line, which just, which would be a simple walk for a man is this horrifying event for you. And for a woman that shows that inside your house, you have sanctuary but you should have that outside as well. It should be your sanctuary, your stories make these be so apparent. And was just wondering if if these tools to dismantle these systems like patriarchy? Is it just in the writing? Or what are some strategies you use to help dismantle or show these systems with students or more in your own writing?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  12:30

Well, first of all, thank you, I feel so heard and seen by that quick analysis. That was really that was wonderful for me. Thank you for, for that quick overview of different works that I've put out in the world. That was really special. Yeah, I think that it takes this reorienting, we're so accustomed to, especially within our educational journeys to say the right thing, to be what ever the person in front of us teaching us needs us to be in order to move forward, move on, get the grade, whatever it may be, right tune out. My practice, at heart, it's about tuning in, it's about doing the opposite, right? It's not about the authority in the room. It's about becoming our own authority. And the more that we can tune in and quiet everything around us, and listen. And the first step is to listen to our fears, and to listen to our insecurities, because that's just another iteration of white supremacy in our brain. So it's just another form of manipulation and control to say, you can't do this, you're not any good at this. Who do you think you are? Right? And sometimes these are the voices within our own families from internalized racism, right? This is who you know, who do you owe your fancy? Who do you think you are? Right? So, so these are, these are the voices that haunt us, but they live there and they're not going away? We just got to acknowledge that that's what that is. And then we move forward and we say, Okay, if I can move past fear, right, what do I want to try? What do I want to risk and failure's okay. So if we just accept the failures, okay, what do I want to try? And when we attempt something, whatever classroom it may be, it doesn't have to be a creative writing classroom. My goal was the anti racist writing workshop, is to couch it in creative writing, but like, please extend it. Right? I'm working with science teachers, I'm working with math teachers and working with history teachers, like extend it beyond, let's activate our imaginations to see how much we can empower students across the academic curriculum. And so we we embolden our students to try something that they're afraid to try and, and then as they're doing it, we ask them to listen. How's it going? check in with yourself? What are you proud of? What, what's really hard for you? What do you want this to be? But it's not yet, right? And we ask questions, encourage students to ask questions of themselves to be their own assessors. And then finally, how did it go? Right? What do you think about what you produced? What do you want to change, if you had an opportunity to change it, go on and try it, right? until they're able to tune in and say, I trust my own voice, I trust who I am, my gut, whatever we want to call it right to be able to go inward and say, I'm going to tune you out right now and listen to me. And I think that is so powerful for all of our students, but especially our students of color, and especially our young women of color, who can say, okay, now I can trust me, I'm going to listen to that voice that tells me this is an unsafe situation. I'm going to listen to that voice that says leave now. Right? I'm going to listen to that voice that says you cannot talk to me. No, thank you. Don't talk to me that way. And I'm going to trust that voice. And I'm going to act on it. So it is, as I said, it's couched in creative writing. But the whole gist of it is, how can we truly embrace our own voices and exercise those voices to create change in our culture?

 chris time steele  16:28

Yeah, I love that answer. And you really talk about boundaries in your in your book as well. And how were you when you were turning 30. And you talked about the trust in yourself and the power of No, and how this helped you fight back against educational and academic trauma that you were experiencing?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  16:46

Yeah, that that was the turn for me, was becoming a mother. And it was a really hard time period in my life. My husband, I was a new mother. And I don't consider myself maternal. And there are some women who are like that I've since learned, you know, are we like, you know, I changed the diaper for the first time when I changed my son's diaper. It was on on the job learning. And, and I had I experienced postpartum depression, probably as a situational and hormonal kind of situation, we had just moved to a new town, my husband took on a new job, he was traveling a lot, I didn't know anybody. And I just remember being in the house a lot. There was this huge wildfire. And so we weren't allowed to go outside for weeks because of the smoke. And so it was just like, contained. And and this, not a good recipe for mental health, for a new mother especially. And it was then that I start I knew I had to speak up. Like I knew I had to start saying what I wanted, what I needed. And so that was a that was a big turn for me. Again, intricately linked with with being a woman.

 chris time steele  18:05

I was wondering on my next question, Is this the kind of two questions they may relate I notice a lot of mutualism in your writing in your pedagogy? How you talk about deep listening, it also reminds me of some of those Zapatista teachings of asking, we walk kind of that we, we learn as we go, and we reflect as we go. But we don't get paralyzed by that fear. I was wondering if if there's a relation with mutualism, with your inspiration for your writing. And it also sees this ties in with Audre Lorde on quote you used, the way we can do is by creating another whole structure that touches every aspect of our existence at the same time as we are resisting it.

 Felicia Rose Chavez  18:51

I mean, that's, that's the difficulty that presents itself, right is that we're on a learning journey together as educators, those of us who are invested in doing the work, and I'm doing facilitations now all over the country, with elementary, middle, high school, undergraduate and graduate teachers, who are eager to learn that the question comes up again and again, is this the right place to do this work? Can we do this work within the institution? How do we, how do we flourish when the structure is set up so that we fail? And it's a tough question? It's a question that's keeping me up at night. Especially when it comes to our younger students like they're so they're held to a particular learning standard, right? Very strict learning standard. And there's no collapsing that system yet. As one brilliant educator just shared with me the other day on a meeting. He said let's do it anyway. With our with our kiddos with our little ones, let's just do it. Let's Let's lead them through an anti racist writing workshop curriculum. And then they'll become the next generation to overturn the standardized tests and the learning standards that they've been held prisoner to, for so, so long. And I thought that was really exciting, exciting way to think about it, right? How do we, how do we learn along the journey to change the restrictions that we face on a daily basis? Right. And it's, it's reminiscent of that last letter that I include in the book, which is addressed to the reader? And it's something like how do we live racism and mourn racism and fight racism all at the same time, it feels impossible, sometimes it's just, I'm just gonna lie in the bed, be useless, because I'm so overwhelmed by all of this. And then there are other days where you can take on the fight and try to change the system within so

 chris time steele  21:03

are you referring to the Letter to Close? When the police officer was blocking your driveway? This, this may lead to my my next question. And you may have already answered it with I really liked that answer. We're planting the seeds, and the students in the next generations to fight the threat to blossoming that is in academia or just education systems. And this question is of the do you worry about your book being co opted by liberal institutions? As an example, after George Floyd was murdered, we saw many businesses and colleges make statements about white supremacy and racial justice. But at the same time, there's been so many murders since then, of people of color Black, Indigenous communities and Black trans communities. And also with the recent killings of Daunte Wright and now Adam Toledo. My academic institution has been silent as well. Do you worry, the term anti racist writing workshop will be branded but still reproduce the violent and toxic problems that you wrote about?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  22:11

I mean, likely? Likely, I mean, look at, you know, these schools that I'm working with now, quite a few of them preempted, you know, before the book preemptively took on this anti racist initiative. Right, Colorado College, whom I work for, has taken on an anti racist initiative college wide. They're attempting to do the work. I feel, perhaps more so than some of the colleges that I kind of, you know, step foot in, and then and then exit. When I do these facilitations. They're at the very beginning of this initiative, whatever they label it is true anti racist work. I wouldn't call it that. Right. I think that's the term that's popular at the moment. But hey, that's a lot further than what we were three years ago, right? No one was throwing around that term at the college and university level, to the extent that they are now, again, co opting is the right term. I think that they're putting out fires. Because students are demanding again and again and again, that there's change. So I think it's a gesture to address those concerns. The real work happens daily, and college wide. And that's where we get into trouble. Because I think the attitude of many faculty members is, oh, well, we'll just have to wait on so and so's retirement in order to stop implementing harm. Because we all know so and so is, you know, horribly terrible, right? There's this 10 year old system where we have folks who are irresponsibly educating their students, it's hard for me to enter into the Zoom space and do these facilitations when I can see the dismissiveness at play sometimes with faculty. This isn't to say that it's always this way. Sometimes they're very sincere groups who are asking a lot of questions that are very engaged. Sometimes people turn their turn their bodies away from me, they'll roll their eyes, they'll sigh they're clearly doing something else, right. they're required to be there to hear me out or tune me out, whatever it is that they're doing. The University of Iowa just brought me in to do a panel and a public reading, which was a surprise for me, and it was one of the worst couple of weeks I've had since the book came out. I was not eating well, I couldn't sleep. It was reliving a trauma that I hadn't anticipated would be so difficult. For me, and it truly was, and I think that was also damage control. Right? I think it was putting public facing events out to the world to say, Yes, she, you know, she writes about her experience. So look, we're listening to her, will there be change that comes as a result of that I'm not facilitating workshops with those faculty members. And I'm curious if that does happen, right? I don't know. It's disappointing a lot of the time, and I get a lot of hate mail. And you've talked about the gendered politics of this all I mean, there's horribly sexist, as well as racist. And it's discouraging. It's disappointing to hear echoes of these hate messages out of the mouths of professors who are responsible for generations of students, you know, quick to dismiss and deny that racism even exists. It's scary sometimes.

 chris time steele  25:58

I think you made a great point of many awesome points, that just having an anti racist workshop, even if it's not being lived up to it lays this great foundation for it to be called out and put back into place, when it's not being used correctly. By as you said, these students who seeds were planted in optimism of this?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  26:20

Absolutely, I do a facilitation called self advocacy for students. And that's my favorite one to do. Because it's, it's how to hold one another as peers accountable and how to hold our educators accountable. Every time I talk to educators, I say you need to explicitly say it. I teach an anti racist writing workshop, I teach an anti racist econ class, I teach an anti racist history class, like, How can you be so explicit, so as to empower your students to hold you accountable, right, because if you just come out and say it, now you've got to follow through. And, and I want all of our young people to be able to exercise their voices in that way, where they were their reminders, constant reminders to one another, and to their, to their teachers, that they deserve better.

 chris time steele  27:17

I also loved throughout this book that you call out gatekeeping even with, not just within academia, but within these writing groups that these workshops, there's often a lot of gatekeeping that goes on, and I like the you talk about gaslighting, and also the importance of language, all these different things that really cause so much violence, and how you call out words like literary and classical, which are another synonyms for gatekeeper. And I just really love that you I just wanted to highlight that this is so important what you bring out. And when I was teaching political science and history, this was something I was trying to change in my department to stop using words like slave and using enslaved, I had a big fight with my department when I tried to get rid of a Pearson textbook, and try to add Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, The People's Indigenous History of the US.

 Felicia Rose Chavez  28:14

Wow, that was a fight?

 chris time steele  28:16

Yeah, then they told me because I didn't have a PhD. I didn't know about scholarship, that the book was against America and all kinds of things is so horribly racist things and it really reminded me of your story on Shakespeare, but not being a play that was highlighted for just not one time, which became an outrage.

 Felicia Rose Chavez  28:37

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just just earlier today I, a board member at the creative writing studies organization, I just joined, and they put out a call for proposals for conference panels. And I just read the call and noted language in there, like, you know, you must have, you must cite other sources, scholarly sources that support this work, you know, this, this is the same old rhetoric that that we offer one another to maintain this, this domination over who gets the control of the narrative, right. And to me, that's no different from our officers saying, you know, there was a meme that I posted, you know, it's a package of Skittles, it's a gunm a cell phone, it's a gun, a sandwich, it's a gun and then a taser? Oh, no. Right. I got confused. I didn't have you know, a gun is a taser like it's, it's control of the narrative. So, so it extends across our culture. It's not just within academia, but it is shameful, how we use that as as a standard to enforce white supremacy without having to use those words.

 chris time steele  29:56

Definitely. Thank you. This is probably my last question, I want to be mindful of your time, along with your amazing book which I have already recommended it to so many people, the Anti Racist Writing Workshop, I'd like to talk about your other writings as well. And I love Femme Fatal. the great frat boy in the sky, your other writings, how they deal with a field to deal with a lot of grief, Anatomy of a Life is one, the Mindful Birthing. I love that one. I was wondering if you could talk about the piece Memory Loop, which I found extremely personal and powerful and vulnerable. Wondering if you could talk about the process for this piece of was it therapeutic to write? Did it reopen wounds? Or did it help to heal wounds? Or was it a combination?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  30:49

That's That's the one. I feel like all the other writing was just practice, right. I mean, it was just fun. Well, not always fun. But but more experiments. You know, I wanted to try different things with my writing. But that was the very first piece I ever wrote. I taught writing for many years as a way of supporting myself. And I taught writing because I was such an avid reader. And so I think the two go hand in hand and in that I was able to share strategies that appealed to me, as a reader, and relay that but not necessarily coming from a place of a writer speaking to another writer, I thought of myself as a teacher for so many years. And it took needing to relocate to Albuquerque, from Chicago, to go back home and serve as a caretaker, to my parents, my dad specifically, that motivated me to say, well, I'll try. I'll try graduate school, I'll try a writing program, let me dedicate some time to writing. So I showed up for a two week period, I showed up every day, a little bit early to work. And I wrote, you know, maybe 20-30 minutes per day in my little cubicle. And I would write and cry and write and cry. And what I created, I didn't edit I just sent out. And that was the very early version of memory loop. It took me between 10 and 12 years to return to that piece over and over and over again, I did so many different versions of that piece. I mean, the bones are still the same, but I tried reordering it, retitling it, like I mean, I just just adding a ton of research, taking it out. It was the, it never felt right. And once I achieved the draft the current draft, I thought I just knew it. It's like the body knows. It just I just knew it was almost like a sigh of relief. Like I finally did it. And it was, I think, transitioning from this is what happened to me, right, which I think is what we all come to the page as an act of like, release, right, this is what happened to me, I was witness to this, then, you know, this is, let me try to get inside the head of my mother who had experienced great depression. And it's kind of a stunning, shocking depression, which felt out of nowhere, when in truth was years long in the making, once I stepped out of her experience and into my own and really owned my own my own actions, like I'm complicit in this story, I'm not just there watching it happen. I'm involved, and I need to point the finger at myself as well, it needs to be, you know, like, it needed to be way more complicated than I was initially prepared to make it because I had to, I had to process it first. So to make something of it took many, many years. And it taught me something I learned about myself in writing that and coming to terms with my own guilt, as a you know, a participant in in the story. And in that in that few years, you know, 10, 5 years of my mom's life. And I'm really grateful that I didn't settle for that first draft. I'm really grateful that I did that work and went back again and again. Because I think that I needed to teach myself something in that writing.

 chris time steele  34:22

Wow, thanks for sharing that process it's such a powerful piece, you switch from narrative so smoothly. You know, some writers have to use the three stars to show we can do the scene as a new narrative. And then your piece went to so many different avenues that was just so powerful. Thank you for explaining that process.  Thank you for listening to this episode of the time talks podcast. Please check out some other shows on the Channel Zero Network. Thanks to Awareness for the music, please support his music on Bandcamp and please pick up Felicia Rose Chavez's his book out on Haymarket, the Anti Racist Writing Workshop, and check out her other writings. I'll link them in the show notes. See you all next time and free Palestine.

#anti racism #channel zero network #Haymarket Books #patriarchy

[4trackmind]

Unapologetic

My very first few therapy sessions with Tammy, I was a mess (to put it lightly).

I sat across from her, and spoke the story that I knew had landed me in that office. But that was all it was - empty words attempting to portray some truth with minimal feelings. But so much of truth lies in the emotions, how could you possibly paint a narrative devoid of it? 

I finished telling (what I believed to be my truth, and Tammy sat across from me in silence (doing the thing that I’ve learned therapists do - let things sit without reacting and see if there’s more the patient contributes). I watched her absorb it all in a way I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone really listen to me before. She cocked her head for a minute and pondered a while longer, then looked directly in my eyes and spoke to me with such care that it was jarring to me.

You’re telling me all these things that have happened to you and that you’re struggling with, all of which are very serious and heavy things, and yet as you tell me these very tough things, you’re telling them to me with a smile on your face. I don’t think you find any of this funny. Why are you smiling, even now as I tell you this?

Your situation is not unique. And I don’t say this to belittle you, I say this to let you know there have been others in your situation before that have found a way out, and you will too. 

You speak to your past unapologetically, and you’ve only recently began embracing this beautiful free spirit of yours.

I don’t keep in touch with most family friends much anymore, but every so often my mother fills me in on who’s child is out and about doing what now. Every time she’s told me one of these bits of gossip, a rush of negative energy fills me, and it’s annoying yet oh so comfortable. And I didn’t like it, so mostly I’d shut my eyes and nod along and make the new piece of knowledge disappear so I wouldn’t have to think on it any more so that I could continue focusing on my own life I’ve been working on building.

I’ve disappeared on social media for a number of reasons, many of which I believe is for an overall healthier mental wellbeing. It brings me too much anxiety to put my life out on display for others to peer into. I’m frustrated by the constant judgement from my sister with the little view I’ve given her. And I’m frustrated by all the people from my past - family friends, old private school friends - who have somehow stumbled upon my face in internet land and felt the desire to connect with me so they, too, can peer into my life and judge all the ways in which I’ve deviated from who they once knew.

Except, I’m beginning to realize the narrative I’ve created might solely exist in my head and self-isolation is all I’ve ever known when left in discomfort.

The last few days, I’ve been scrolling through my suggested friends on Facebook and Instagram as I always do, intending to creep on people from my past without signaling my interest to them nor opening the door for them to reciprocate the creepiness.

Over in Instagram land was that one little girl from that one very religious family who decided to join the Marines. Everyone said she was crazy and wasn’t gunna make it through bootcamp - but I kind of had a feeling she would, because I know first-hand how strong that drive to work towards the one path that will pave your way out of this crazy cult-ish world can be. And she did it, and in some weird way, even though I had never been close with her growing up or now, I was proud of her. I was proud of her for doing that and for the way she drove her headscarf wearing mother to attend a marines graduation ceremony with a smile on her face, no matter how contrived it may have been.

In Facebook land, I stumbled upon my best friend from elementary school school, and realized she just got married two weeks ago. I studied her profile picture, her in a pretty unconventional wedding dress, with the same pretty smile I remember from first grade, pure happiness radiating from her. And beside her was a Hispanic man, clearly not Muslim. And her parents were no where in sight, in none of her photos - they probably didn’t approve - and yet there she was, living her life and claiming her happiness. And one of the first comments was another girl from elementary school, who wedded a white man (non-muslim, just about as while as they get, blonde hair blue eyes and all) two years ago. 

And I broke down, because I was so happy for her and also so frustrated with myself at the same time.

That familiar feeling I get when my mother shares the latest family friend gossip? It’s a feeling so very familiar to me that I’ve felt so many times throughout my upbringing, that I’m surprised I haven’t been able to name it until now.

It’s jealousy.

I felt it all the time growing up - I was jealous that I’d never know what it’d be like to get dolled up for a school dance with your friend, to have some dumb boy ask you out on a dance. I was jealous I couldn’t hand out after dark when kids find trouble to get into and at the same time bond with each other, experience a rush of excitement, and hopefully eventually also learn something along the way. I was jealous I couldn’t do my hair, paint on same makeup, and walk out of the house knowing I’d command attention from those around me and not feel like a guilty hoe for enjoying it.

And now, I am jealous to hear the stories of how my family friends are growing up and claiming their lives from their parents in a way I still haven’t mustered up the courage to do.

When my friends of the past tried to connect with me many years ago, I wasn’t ready to connect with them because I was still shaping my own world that I quickly realized was looking a lot different than the world I’ve come from, and I assumed everyone from that past world would be just like my sister - judgemental, upset at me for straying away from the paths laid out by our parents, and jealous. But now, I don’t think that was necessarily the case.

I self-isolated out of fear of being misunderstood, of not having anyone know the struggles I’m facing and continuing to try to figure out how to navigate on my own. My family and the Muslim community has always thrived on creating an isolating narrative, one in which there is great shame associated with anything that deviated from the path laid out for you, where you’re taught you do not ever speak of such issues outside of the family unit. But all along, the people from my past were carving their own paths, and though each and every one of them have undoubtedly had great struggles, perhaps they learned much sooner than me that they could find support through shared struggles. The realization has made me feel silly and dumb for putting myself through such discomfort on my own for no real reason other than my pride; yet it’s also empowering to have discovered an entire untapped source of support.

The Muslim community from my past may be the same community to provide me some kind of support through my transitioning out of the Muslim world.

I’ve always felt jealousy and a sense of sadness when looking at the lives portrayed by ‘Americans’, the white people who get to live out their lives and find happiness- that’s not the world I came from, and I’ve always been told those people are not like me. But the sense of jealousy and sadness I feel when looking at (ex?) Muslims of my past is one in which I mourn the lost of my own free-spirit, my own ability to live unapologetically and live for my own happiness, obligations aside. As far as I’ve come on my journey, I still haven’t found a satisfactory blend of the two world I’ve been living in, one in which I maintain my cultural roots and connection to my family but also live the full extent of my life and feel happy and fulfilled, without guilt.

I had prided myself in the way that Tammy had smiled at the way I described all my less-than-wise choices made in my college years, the ones that I still giggle at with a sense of smugness for having done that one stupid thing but would do all over again if given the chance. One ex had upsetedly told me that my free-spirit was too much to keep up with, and that my unapologetic way of living was too frustrating - and that was more or less the moment i knew we wouldn’t be able to work.

I love my free-spirit nature, my silly whims and less than well-thought out decisions and spontaneous plannings, and I love my ability to look back on actions in my past - the good, the bad and the ugly - and feel unapologetic about any and all of it because I know each and every experience was what was right for that exact moment of who I was in my life.

And now that I know it’d around there somewhere, I’d like to re-claim that shroudded spirit.

[deniscollins]

A Black Student’s Mother Complained About ‘Fences.’ He Was Expelled.

What would you do if you were the principal of a private middle school studying August Wilson’s “Fences,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 about a Black family, and an African-American parent of one of the few African American students objected because of the racist slurs peppered with racial slurs from the first page: (1) continue with the Fences’ curriculum, (2) cancel the curriculum, (3) censor the curriculum, (4) give that one students and others who feel the same way a separate assignment, (5) something else, if so what? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Faith Fox, a lawyer and single mother, said in an interview that she imagined her son’s mostly white class at the Providence Day School reading the dialogue out loud. She said her main concern was that the themes were too mature for the group and would foster stereotypes about Black families.

After a round of emails and a meeting with Ms. Fox, the school agreed to an alternate lesson for her son, Jamel Van Rensalier, 14. The school also discussed complaints with the parents of four other students. Ms. Fox’s disagreement escalated. She took it to a parents’ Facebook group, and later fired off an email that school officials said was a personal attack on a faculty member.

On the day after Thanksgiving, the school notified Ms. Fox that Jamel would no longer be attending the school, the only one he had ever known.

His mother called it an expulsion. The school referred to it as “a termination of enrollment” that had to do with the parent, not the student. Either way, what was meant to be a literary lesson in diversity and inclusion had somehow cost a Black 14-year-old his place in an elite private high school.

Jamel had recently made the school basketball team and said in an interview that he hoped to graduate as a Providence Day lifer. “I was completely crushed,” he said. “There was no, ‘Please don’t kick me out, I won’t say this, I won’t say that, my mom won’t say this, my mom won’t say that.’” He is making plans to attend public school in January.

This year has brought a reckoning with race at many American institutions, including schools. When widespread street protests erupted after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, young people across the country used social media to expose racism at their schools. At Providence Day School, Black students shared stories of discrimination and insensitivity on Instagram, and the school was among many that released statements against racism.

“For the Black members of our community, we see you, we hear you and we will act,” the statement said. The school also revised its bias complaint process and created alumni, faculty and student diversity groups.

But Ms. Fox said, she felt the school’s treatment of her son proved this was all just lip service.

“You can have the important conversations about race and segregation without destroying the confidence and self-esteem of your Black students and the Black population,” Ms. Fox said in an interview. Just over 7 percent of the school’s 1,780 students are Black, about 70 percent are white, and the rest identify as members of other minority groups.

A spokeswoman for the school, Leigh Dyer, said last week that officials were “saddened” that Jamel had to leave.

“As a school community, we value a diversity of thought and teach students to engage in civil discourse around topics that they might not necessarily agree on,” Ms. Dyer said. “We have the same expectation for the adults in our community.”

The Nov. 27 termination letter cited “bullying, harassment and racially discriminatory actions” and “slanderous accusations towards the school itself” by Jamel’s mother.

Ms. Dyer provided a statement that said Ms. Fox had made “multiple personal attacks against a person of color in our school administration, causing that person to feel bullied, harassed and unsafe” in the discussions about “Fences.” It also said Ms. Fox had a history of making “toxic” statements about the faculty and others at the school, but did not provide examples.

Ms. Fox denied this. “Instead of addressing the issue they’re trying to make me seem like an angry, ranting Black woman,” she said.

The New York Times reviewed emails and Facebook messages that Ms. Fox provided and also interviewed two other Providence Day parents who said they had similar concerns about the play and about a video the school used to facilitate conversations about the racial slur. They spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their children.

The school had notified parents in early November about the lesson plan in an email. Noting the frequent appearance of the slur in dialogue, it said that students would say “N-word” instead when reading aloud. It said time would be “devoted to considering the word itself and some of its more nuanced aspects of meaning.”

The email included a link to a PBS NewsHour interview with Randall Kennedy, a Black professor at Harvard, discussing the history of the slur while using it repeatedly.

“It wasn’t something that I thought was appropriate for a roomful of elite, affluent white children,” Ms. Fox said.

Her son was also dreading the lesson, which he would have attended via video because of the coronavirus pandemic. “It’s really awkward being in a classroom of majority white students when those words come up,” Jamel said, “because they just look at you and laugh at you, talk about you as soon as you leave class. I can’t really do anything because I’m usually the only Black person there.”

Ms. Dyer, the spokeswoman, said the school had introduced the study of “Fences” in 2017 in response to Black parents who wanted more lessons addressing race. In past years, there had been only one complaint about the play, she said.

After her son was offered an alternative assignment, Ms. Fox posted about “Fences” to the Facebook group. Other parents said they too had concerns about the play and the PBS video. One comment directed her to an online essay by a student from a prior year who described the “dagger” she felt “cutting deeper and deeper” with each mention of the slur in the video.

That’s when Ms. Fox sent an email to the school’s director of equity and inclusion, calling her a “disgrace to the Black community.” Ten days later, Jamel was kicked out of the school. Ms. Fox said that she was surprised but that she does not regret sending the email in the heat of the moment.

After Jamel’s expulsion, a letter signed by “concerned Black faculty members” was sent to parents of the four other students who had complained, arguing the literary merits of “Fences.” It said great African-American writers do not create perfect Black characters when they are trying to show the “damaging legacy of racism.”

That is a view held by many critics and academics. Sandra G. Shannon, a professor of African-American literature at Howard University and founder of the August Wilson Society, said schools should not shy away from the “harsh realities of the past.”

Katie Rieser, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, said “Fences” is taught widely in middle school and high school, but she also urged that it be done so with care.

“It’s telling a story about a Black family that, if it’s the only text or it’s one of only a few texts about Black people that students read, might give white students in particular a sense that Black families are all like this Black family,” she said.

Ms. Fox said the fight to be heard as a Black parent at a predominantly white private institution had been “exhausting.”

She recalled when Jamel came home upset in elementary school after a field trip to a former slave plantation. After she complained, the school ended the annual trips, she said.

The other day, she said her son told her he finally understood “why Black Lives Matter is so important and is not just about George Floyd and all of these people dying in the streets, but it also has to do with how we’re treated everywhere else.

#School #Racism #Slurs

[richonnejustdesserts]

Teacher’s Pet : A Richonne Round Robin Fanfic

A small town sheriff and preschool teacher find love thanks to the cutest little matchmaker around.  [RATED: T]

Chapter 3 (written by @reciprocityfic)

Michonne walked into the teacher’s lounge Monday afternoon with a sigh, immediately making her way over to the small table in the corner of the room that she always shared with her two fellow teachers and closest friends, Sasha Williams and Paul Rovia.  Michonne was thankful everyday that she was lucky enough to share her lunch period with them.  With all the adjusting and settling in she’d had to do after her big move, she hadn’t had time to even think about revamping her social life in this small town.  But as it ended up, she hadn’t had to worry about that at all.  Sasha and Paul had been nothing but warm and welcoming to Michonne in her first days at school, and she was drawn to them immediately.  The overwhelming kindness and caring they gave her made this drastic change in her life so much easier and more enjoyable, and convinced her more and more everyday that she’d made the right choice in moving to King County.

Sasha laughed as Michonne nearly collapsed into the chair next to her.

“Damn, girl.  It’s only the first day of the week and you already look like you’ve been through a hurricane.”

“Have you ever tried to fingerpaint with twenty four year-olds?” Michonne asked as she opened her lunch bag and pulled out a shiny red apple, bringing it to her lips and taking a large bite.

“No, but I see that you have,” Sasha said, motioning to the line of blue paint that was smeared over the arm of her long-sleeved gray shirt.  “And, by the way, fractions aren’t a walk in the park either.”

Sasha was a fourth grade teacher, and specialized in teaching math to her often-unwilling students.  But Sasha was a total math nerd, and jumped at every opportunity to foster that same appreciation for the subject in one of her students with joy and enthusiasm.  Michonne immediately called her bluff.

“Sash, you love teaching fractions.”

“True,” Sasha conceded with a wide smile, pushing her black-rimmed glasses up her nose and pushing her dark, curly hair away from her face.  “But you love fingerpainting with your four year-olds too, so I guess we’re even.”

“And I very much appreciate the effort you put into cultivating the little ones’ artistic spirits before they make their way to me,” Paul offered from the other side of Michonne.  He was a full-time art teacher that taught the students from first grade until they graduated to middle school.  He was one of the most creative and patient people Michonne had ever met, leaving him with the ideal temperament for an elementary art educator.  And he looked the part perfectly, with his long brown hair, neatly-trimmed beard, and impeccably put-together outfits.

“At least someone appreciates me,” Michonne said, smiling at Paul while jokingly kicking Sasha under the table.

The three ate in comfortable silence for a few minutes, until Paul put down the sandwich he was eating and glanced at Michonne.

“We never got the chance to ask you how your open house went last week.”

“Yeah,”  Sasha agreed.  “Was it as bad as you thought it was going to be?  You were so nervous last week.”

“I wasn’t nervous,” Michonne protested weakly.  She had been nervous; she just hoped she’d done a better job hiding it.  “And it went really well.  The projects we made turned out nicely, the kids all looked happy to be there and see me.  I liked the parents.”

As soon as she said parents, Rick Grimes’ face popped into her head, and she dropped her eyes down to the table.  She quickly pushed him out of her mind and amended her statement, as if Sasha and Paul would be able to read her thoughts if they lingered on Judith’s father for too long.

“I mean, they all seemed nice.  And normal.  That kind of stuff.”

She tentatively looked up at her friends when they didn’t respond, and saw them carrying with lunch normally.  They seemed to have missed Michonne’s mini-freakout, and she let out a long breath and went to take the last few bites of her apple.

“So, no parents you think you’ll end up paying special attention to?”

She nearly choked on her fruit when she heard Sasha’s question, and she felt her stomach drop.  Again, Rick’s face bombarded her thoughts.  Sasha couldn’t know about him, or her slight, kind-of crush on him.  That was…impossible.  Hell, she’d hardly admitted to herself that she had a crush on him, let alone someone else.

“Michonne?”

Hearing Sasha call her name pulled her out of her mind and back to the situation in front of her, and she hurried to think of response, not knowing how long she’d been sitting there, frozen in shock and potential embarrassment.

“Special attention?  No,” she scoffed, turning and tossing her apple core in a nearby trashcan.  “What does that even mean?  Special attention?”

“You know.  Like, does anyone seem overprotective, or a little crazy, or really picky?  One that’ll be calling you all the time about problems that aren’t even problems.”

She could’ve hit herself as she listened to Paul answer her.  Of course that’s what Sasha meant.  That made so much more sense than what Michonne feared.  She might be thinking about Rick Grimes slightly more than she probably should, but no one else was.

She tried her best to control her expression as she finally turned to face Paul, forcing her lips into a casual smile.

“Oh.  Yeah.  Duh.”

She held her breath as she waited to see if her friend would be able to read anything on her face.  Paul stared at her curiously for a moment before the corner of his mouth began to turn up.

Shit.

“Wait, what did you think I meant?”

She turned to glance at Sasha quickly, who was now staring between both Paul and Michonne, a puzzled look on her face.  Suddenly, Paul chuckled, and Michonne snapped her head back toward him to find his grin had only grown, and a mischievous glint now shined in his eyes.

Shit, she was busted.

She heard Sasha gasp, and Michonne closed her eyes, groaning now that she knew both friends had found her out.

“Oh my God, Michonne, you like - “

Michonne spun in her chair and clamped her hand over Sasha’s mouth immediately.  She stared at her friend pleadingly.

“Please, Sasha, keep it down.”

Michonne quickly glanced around the teacher’s lounge to make sure no one had overheard and taken interest in their conversation.  The room was mostly empty.  There were only two other teachers there, and they were sitting on the other side of the room, the day’s newspaper open to the sports section between them, absorbed in a spirited discussion of last night’s baseball scores.

Both Sasha and Paul leaned closer into Michonne.

“So?”  Sasha whispered.  “Who is he?”

“Yeah, Michonne,” Paul pressed.  “Spill.”

“It’s no one.”

Sasha rolled her eyes.

“Oh, come on, girl.”

“Okay, listen.  I don’t like him,” Michonne rushed to clarify, even though that wasn’t the truth, really.  “I just…he was attractive.  That’s it.”

Her friends were silent as they waited for her to continue, and Michonne couldn’t help the shy smile that crept onto her lips as she thought of his clear blue eyes gazing at her, his warm, soft smile, his bowlegged gait as he walked away from her and towards his car with Judith the night of the open house.

She didn’t even mean to say anything else.  It just slipped out.

“He’s really attractive.”

And sweet.  And a great father, Michonne tacked on in her mind.  And then there was that something else.  She didn’t know quite what it was, but she knew she liked it.

“Michonne Anthony,” Paul began, his voice completely serious.  “You have to tell us who this guy is.”

“Listen.  Yeah, he was hot.  But it’s not like I’m ever going to see him.  I’m not going to hang around with my students’ parents all the time.  He seems completely normal, and his daughter is wonderful, so I don’t think I’ll have to pay any special attention to him.”

“So a single, hot dad with a daughter in Michonne’s preschool class,” Sasha said, tapping her chin with her finger.

Paul and Sasha eagerly waited for Michonne to continue, but she went back to eating her lunch without another word.

“I can’t believe you’re going to leave us hanging on this, Michonne,” Sasha mumbled, but she glanced at Paul and they silently agreed to let it go.  They hadn’t known Michonne terribly long, but she didn’t make it a habit to reveal details of her past romantic relationships.  Maybe she was just private about that stuff.  They didn’t want to pry.

The three of them continued to eat, but Michonne stopped suddenly, biting her lip.  She was dreading what she was about to ask, but she really wanted to know.  Maybe if she just brought it up now, she wouldn’t be put through another embarrassing conversation about it.

“Just out of curiosity - do teachers ever date a parent of one of their students?  Is that something that ever happens?”

Her two friends just stared at her for a moment, and then Sasha grabbed her arm, shaking her slightly.

“Come on, Michonne.  You have to tell us.”

“Seriously,” Paul added.  “This is torture.”

Michonne dropped her head in her hands and sighed loudly.  She couldn’t believe she was about to do this.

“It’s Judith’s dad,” Michonne grumbled into her palms.

“What?” Sasha and Paul asked in unison.

“It’s Judith Grimes’ dad,” she repeated in a clearer voice.

Paul perked up immediately.

“Grimes?”

“Wait, Rick Grimes?”

“Sasha,” Michonne scolded, elbowing her friend.  Sasha’s words were too loud for Michonne’s liking, and she scanned the room again.  Luckily, the two other teachers had already left the lounge.  Michonne looked at the time on her phone.  Lunch period was almost over.

Paul and Sasha just stared into space for a few seconds, and Michonne looked at them nervously.  They almost looked stunned.

“Wow, Michonne,” Paul said, finally.  “You’re right.  He is hot.”

Michonne’s brow furrowed.

“Wait, you guys have talked about him before?”

“Um, yeah,” Sasha revealed, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.  “Us and everyone else.  You think the teachers don’t gossip about the hot parents?  Plus, Judith has an older brother in sixth grade.”

“Carl,” Michonne said.

“Yeah.  So Mr. Grimes has been around for awhile.  And to answer your question, no.  Teachers here don’t really date parents.  At least, not as long as I’ve worked here.”

“But,” Paul chimed in, “I think an exception can be made.  Especially for someone like Rick Grimes.”

“Oh, definitely,” Sasha agreed.  “I was getting to that part.”

“Really?” Michonne asked softly.  She couldn’t help the small pang of excitement that began to beat in her heart.

“Yes,” Paul said emphatically.

“I think you should go for it,” Sasha told her in a sing-songy voice.

Michonne shrugged.

“I don’t know.  I’ve only seen him the one time, at open house.  Well, and at the grocery store over the weekend.”

Sasha’s eyebrows shot up.

“Oh?” questioned Paul.

“It was a total coincidence,” Michonne assured them, rolling her eyes at her friends who were seemingly insatiable for information about her and Rick.  “I ran in for a few things and I bumped into him and Judith and Carl in the checkout line.”

“Coincidence?” Sasha mused, sending a sly glance Paul’s way.  “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Sounds like fate to me,” Paul teased.

Michonne exhaled slowly.

“I can’t deal with you two.”

“Don’t lie, girl,” Sasha told her, smirking.  “You know you love us.”

“Barely,” Michonne murmured.

Sasha and Paul burst out laughing, and Michonne put her hands over her face again.  But this time, it was mostly to hide the smile that she couldn’t seem to hold back.

She couldn’t believe this was happening.

“Rick?  Hey, Rick.”

Rick jumped as someone snapped their fingers in front of his face, and he blinked and focused to find Glenn gazing at him with an exasperated expression on his face.

“You okay, dude?  This is like, the fourth time you’ve spaced out tonight.”

“It’s no use,” Shane said from beside Rick, nursing his second beer of the night.  “He’s been like this all day.  You try to have a conversation with him, and he ain’t even listening to half of what you have to say.”

Rick looked at his best friend and partner with a slight frown on his face.  He hadn’t realized Shane had picked up on how distracted he’d been at work today.  He guessed it shouldn’t have surprised him.  The two of them were best friends, and had been nearly inseparable since second grade.  Now that they were in their early forties and spent basically every day together as partners at King County’s sheriff department, Shane probably knew him better than anyone.

“Sorry,” Rick said.  “I must have a lot on my mind.  I’m a little tired.”

“Everything okay?” Glenn asked from across the table.  “You want to cut tonight short?”

Rick, Glenn, and Shane met every Monday at the pizza shop Glenn owned.  Carl and Judith always spent Mondays with their mother, so it served as a perfect opportunity for the three of them to spend the evening sharing a couple of free pizzas and drinks, courtesy of Glenn, and catch up on each other’s lives.  Although Rick and Shane saw each other everyday, they weren’t able to spend as much quality time with Glenn as they would’ve liked to.  Glenn had moved to King County a few years ago to open his restaurant, and it had been an immediate success, thanks in large part to its owner.  Glenn was one of the best people Rick had ever met in his life, and people were quick to support him and accept him as one of King County’s own.  The delicious food was just an added bonus, and it was one of the things that had attracted Rick to the shop in the first place, coupled with its close proximity to his home.  He and Glenn had become fast friends, and when Rick introduced him to Shane, the two hit it off despite their almost completely opposite personalities.

Rick smiled and shook his head, trying to ease his friends’ concerns.

“Nah, I’m fine.  Like I said, I’m probably just tired.”

Except, that wasn’t really true.  He wasn’t tired.  And he didn’t have much on his mind.  In fact, he had only one thing on his mind.  That was the problem.

He couldn’t stop thinking of Judith’s new teacher.  Michonne Anthony.

The woman had intrigued him ever since she first moved into town and took over for Mrs. Miller.  Judith had immediately fallen in love with her, coming home and going on for hours about all the new, exciting things her and the rest of her classmates were doing with Miss A.  Judith had never been more eager to go to school everyday.  And that appealed to him immensely, long before he actually met Miss A in person.  Anyone who was that good to his daughter got a passing grade in his book.

However, when he did meet her in person, she nearly knocked him off his feet.

It wasn’t just that she was beautiful, although she undoubtedly was.  In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d met someone as beautiful as her.  Michonne Anthony, with her wide, kind, brown eyes and smile that could light up an entire room.

But it was more than that.  It was the way every child - not just Judith - was enthralled by her, her warm personality, the ease and grace with which she navigated the room at the open house.  It was how natural she was with Judith when they’d run into each other at the store on Saturday, and how she seemed to genuinely care about his daughter.

There was something else, too.  Something he couldn’t put his finger on, or quantify.  It was intangible.  He couldn’t name it.  But he had been drawn to it immediately.  And now he couldn’t get it, or her, out of his head.

Since that night at Judith’s school, every time he had a quiet moment, his thoughts tended to drift to her.  And according to Shane and Glenn, it was starting to show.

Rick shook his head again, as if he was trying to shake her from him mentally with his physical actions.  He took a deep breath and tried his best to focus on his friends.

“Anyways, what did I miss?”

“I asked you how Carl’s baseball game went last week,” Glenn informed him.

“Oh.  It went well.  Carl hit a home run,” Rick reported, smiling at the pride that swelled in his chest when he thought of his son.

“Awesome!”

“Yeah, the kid definitely gets his baseball skills from his Uncle Shane, and not from his dad,” Shane declared.

Rick rolled his eyes, and picked up a slice of pizza.  As he bit into it, his thoughts once again drifted back to Michonne, and how they’d discussed Glenn’s restaurant when they’d spoken at the grocery store.  He had really wanted to invite her to eat with them sometime.  He wondered what she would’ve said.

“Jesus, Rick.”

Rick felt a dull ache as Shane punched his shoulder to get his attention.

“For real, Rick,” Glenn said.  “Where are you tonight?”

Rick went to play his distraction off again, but hesitated, instead grabbing his beer and taking a sip.  He couldn’t seem to bury his interest in Michonne, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to until he decided what to do about it.  Plus, he hadn’t tried asking anyone out for the first time since he approached Lori back in high school.  He could use some advice.

So he went for it.

“Question.  What do you do if you like a girl, and you want to ask her out, but you’re not sure if she likes you back and you don’t want to make anything awkward?  Also, what if the situation between you is kind of…unusual, I guess, and you’re not even sure if you should risk asking her out in the first place?”

Both Shane and Glenn stared at Rick in silence.  He could feel heat rising in his chest and up to his cheeks as a light pink blush began to color his skin.  He was about to tell everyone to just forget he said anything when Shane barked out a loud laugh.

“Well, would you look at that,” Shane said, a huge smile taking over his face.  “Boy Scout finally has a pulse after the divorce.”

Rick groaned.

“Shane, can we please be serious about this?”

“What do you mean?  I’m being serious as hell.  I’ve been waiting a year for this moment.”

Rick bit back the urge to groan again, and turned his eyes to Glenn for help, but his friend lifted up his hands in front of him.

“Hey, don’t look at me.  You’re the one that brought it up in front of him.”

Rick closed his eyes, bringing his hand up to rub his temples.

“Yeah, maybe that was a mistake.”

“No, brother,” Shane said, moving one of his hands to rest on Rick’s back.  “I’m really, seriously happy for you.  And if you’re going to get dating advice from someone, it should probably be from me.”

“That’s true,” Glenn agreed.  “I’ve dated about two girls in my entire life.”

“Yeah, and he proposed to the second one.”

Glenn crossed his arms defensively at Shane’s comment.

“Hey, sometimes you’re lucky enough to find the right girl right away.”

A few months ago, Glenn had gotten engaged to Hershel Greene’s oldest daughter, Maggie.  Their family lived on a farm at the edge of town.  They were wonderful people, and Glenn and Maggie couldn’t have been a better couple.

“Sure,” Shane conceded.  “And Maggie’s a great girl.  I’m not knocking your decision, I’m just pointing out that it doesn’t leave you with the best dating advice.”

“So, are you going to give me this wonderful advice you have, or are you going to keep making fun of me?” Rick asked impatiently.

“Relax, brother.  I’m not making fun of you,” Shane insisted, shifting all his attention to his best friend.  “I promise.  So let me make sure I have the situation straight.  You like this girl, and you want to ask her out, but you don’t know if she likes you.  And you’re in some kind of unique situation with her, so you’re not sure if it’s smart for you to ask her out at all.  Correct?”

“Correct,” Rick confirmed.

“You want to tell me what this unique situation is?”

“Nope,” Rick said immediately.  He wasn’t going to give Shane any hint that might lead him to figure out that the woman in question was Michonne.  Knowing Shane, the whole town would know by the next afternoon.

“You sure?  It would really help me tailor my advice if I could get some more details.”

“Well, you’re not getting anymore details, so make do with what you have.”

“Fine,” Shane said with a sigh.  “Well, the way I see it, you have two options.  One - you could let your fear get the best of you and do nothing, and watch your girl go off and fall in love with some other guy while you’re stuck never knowing what could’ve happened if you’d had the balls to ask her out.  Or, two - you bite the bullet and go for it.  Sure, it could end horribly.  Or it could be the best decision you’ll ever make in your life.”

Shane took a long sip of his beer, and then ran his hand over his head.

“Personally, I’d go with option two.”

“Same,” Glenn agreed from across the table.  “If you don’t, you might spend your whole life wondering what would’ve happened. I know my experience is limited, but it seems like that would really suck.”

Shane tilted his bottle towards Glenn.

“You know what they say.  It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

“Wow, Shane,” Glenn said, a smirk on his face.  “I didn’t know you could quote Tennyson.”

Shane started at Glenn blankly.

“Um…”

Glenn chuckled.

“You have no idea who Tennyson is, do you?”

“Not a clue,” Shane admitted shamelessly.

“Yeah, you never struck me as the kind of guy who was into poetry.”

Rick half-listened to his two friends go back and forth, but his mind was still stuck on Michonne.  He considered everything Shane and Glenn had said.  Their advice made sense.  And the more he thought about it, the more he agreed with them.  He didn’t want to end up with unresolved feelings about his situation with Michonne, and be curious for, potentially, years to come regarding what would’ve happened if he’d only had the nerve to ask her on a date.  And the school year was almost over.  If things did go south, he could probably avoid Miss A for the most part, and then Judith would move on to kindergarten and he could put any leftover mess behind him.

He didn’t think he would have to, though, because he didn’t think that things would go south.   He had no real reason to believe that; he’d spent minimal time with Michonne.  She seemed happy and at ease with him in their brief interactions, but maybe that was just her being polite and trying to get along with the parent of one of her students.

But he felt something deep in his gut.  That intangible thing.  He couldn’t shake his sense that this could be the start of something really good.

“Wow, Rick,” he heard Shane say as he reached over and clapped Rick on the back again.  “Finally.  I was afraid this was never going to happen.”

Rick rolled his eyes at Shane almost on reflex, but a small smile played on his lips as he brought his beer bottle back to his lips.

He couldn’t believe this was happening.

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 |

#author: reciprocityfic #richonne #richonne fanfiction #richonne round robin #teacher's pet #rjd writing network #rick grimes #michonne #judith grimes #calr grimes #grimes family 2.0

[purplesurveys]

209

Your Autobiography. Little kiddies. (Grades 1-5) What color hair did you have? As I’ve never dyed my hair before, it was also black. Did you wear glasses or have contacts? Yep I had glasses starting when I was in Grade 5. I was supposed to have them earlier but my mom thought I just wanted them to look cool, but my vision was actually getting increasingly worse. It took a letter from the school to convince her. Stupid. Did you have braces? I didn’t, yet. Did you go to pre-school or go straight to kindergarten? Those mean the same thing where I live...it’s just the period before you get to elementary school. And I did, I had three years of preschool. Out of grades 1-5, which one was the best for you? I was the happiest in Grade 5. I made friends and was part of a group. Angela and I became closer at the time, too.

Did you have a lot of friends, or just a couple? I only had a handful for the first few years. Like I said, I didn’t start gaining friends until I was in fifth grade. What were your favorite shows? Drake and Josh, That’s So Raven, Zoey 101, Hannah Montana, The Suite Life. What were your favorite movies? High School Musical...it was HUGE all those five years so forgive me. Did you read Goosebumps? I did! My cousin had several copies so I read them all, when I still used to be a bookworm. I’ve forgotten all the titles though. What was your favorite thing to do on weekends? I always liked playing outside...but I think once we installed internet in the house, I never got out of it during the weekends anymore. Pre-Teens. (Grades 6-9) What color hair did you have? Again, black. We weren’t allowed to dye our hair so it would’ve been useless anyway. What color hair did you want? I was really into Paramore then so I wanted red or orange. Was your Middle School a seperate school from Junior High? I only went through Grade 6 and 7 and they were also part of elementary–in other words, the Grades 1-7 I did have is considered elementary. We didn’t start adjusting to and following the K-12 program like the States until in recent years. Long story short, this question doesn’t apply to me. Did you have a lot of boyfriends/girlfriends? I had zero of those. I had a serious crush on Andi before that I would have acted on if she stayed here, but she moved to New Zealand in Grade 6. Did you still watch Disney movies? Of course. Toy Story 3 was released during this period. What kind of music did you listen to? No clue. This was when the worst of my depression started taking place. As such, I have little recollection of the music I listened to, mainly because I was locked in my room for most of these years. What were some of your interests? Writing in my diary because it was my only friend at the time. What was your favorite animal? Dogs. What was your favorite color? Black? Did you draw? I’ve always hated drawing. What was your favorite subject? I liked science in Grade 6 but that changed to English in Grade 7. Did you have any piercings?  I had them but I wasn’t wearing earrings anymore after they got infected in Grade 4. Did you wear make-up to school? It wasn’t allowed and I had no interest in it so no way. What kinds of clothes did you wear? We had a school uniform. What did you do on the weekends? Stay in the room, write in my diary, have plans about running away, fantasizing about disappearing and starting over, never eating...a wonderful childhood to look back on. Smells Like... Teeeenagerrrrs. (Grades 10-12) Did you like your high school? Just to clarify: I had the same school all throughout kinder to high school. I loved most of it, except when it came down to its being Catholic, how we were all expected to act ladylike and modest, and the ridiculous fucking dress code that literally every other school laughs it. Otherwise, great school. Was it as bad as they were on TV? I’m not from the States. Shows here don’t portray life in private, Catholic, and all-girls schools. What color hair did you have? Didn’t change, buddy. Did you have any piercings? See previous answer in previous section. ...How about tattoos? No. It was at this stage that I had to face the fact that I was never getting over my fear of needles and so accept that I’m never getting a tattoo. What age did you learn to drive? After high school. I was 17 but was turning 18 the same month. When did you get your license? I got it in June 2016, two months after my lessons. What was your first car? My first and current car is a Mitsubishi Mirage. What was your style? It was very boyish at the start of high school (think WWE and band shirts), but took a drastic turn when I got into Audrey Hepburn and started having a classy style, more dressy. Did you have a lot of friends or just a few? No friends at the beginning with just Gab, but I worked my way up the friend ladder and got comfortable with a group who welcomed me by junior year. What did you do on weekends? Everything but my homework. Did you have a lot of boyfriends/girlfriends or did you have one or two? Just one. What were some of your favorite bands? Paramore, Against Me!, Cro-Mags, The Clash, Rancid, The Misfits, H2O, The Bouncing Souls, Gorilla Biscuits, The Sex Pistols...list goes on. My punk music phase was at an all-time high in high school. What college were you considering? UP Diliman, which I got accepted to. Did you get along with teachers, etc? I mostly just slipped by them since I preferred to be quiet and let others hog the spotlight. A handful clearly didn’t like me. Young Adults. (College years) What did you look like? I mean we’re at the present now haha it’s not really supposed to be in past tense. I suppose I just look exhausted and indifferent all the time. When did you first move out of your parents’ house? I still live here. I don’t plan to move out until I’ve saved enough from a future job. What college did you end up going to? The school of my dreams with the course of my dreams. Didn’t turn out to be as dreamy as I made it out to be though. What kind of music did you like? Right now it’s really just a mixture of everything. I fool around with a bunch of playlists of different genres on Spotify. Did you like college? I’m liking it more than high school, but it still has its challenges. I definitely love that there is a wider variety of people with different views, beginnings, and opinions–hugely different from the ugly homogeneity I had to deal with in my old school. How long were you there? (2 years, 4 years, mooore) I plan to be in college for only four years. Careers. (Any time of your life) What was your first job? I haven’t had a job yet. Did you like it? Are you still there? What do you do now? Just an undergraduate student hoping to get the fuck out of my family’s house and never look back as soon as possible. Do you like it? I can live with it but it sucks having to head home each day. What do you want to do? End up somewhere that’ll help me survive. Odds and ends. Were you a loud baby or a quiet one? I was a very quiet baby. I hate that I was so boring. Did you collect anything growing up? I collected notebooks, many of which remain largely unwritten. Do you still have anything from it? I think so. What was your first IM screen name? I used my mom’s account since I was never allowed to make my own. When did you first hear about Myspace? 2008. I made an account since it was still a thing back then, but I quickly realized it wasn’t a thing here as I couldn’t find real-life friends there. Everyone was on Friendster. Did you have a VF? (VampireFreaks.) Nope.

Do you party a lot? Ehhh no not really, but I don’t mind social gatherings as much as before. Did you? Well definitely not before. I was the biggest wallflower. Gab taught me to be more confident and be better at handling social events. When did you get your first tattoo? Have you ever dyed your hair? Never tried. Did you study any languages (other than the one you were raised to speak)? Yeah but it was very informal education and I doubt it counts. I just tried out Spanish and Korean on Duolingo but soon forgot about them. Are you still into the things you were into when you were 12? For the most part. I have permanent interests that’ll always stick around–Paramore, Beyonce, Twilight, and wrestling hahaha. How about 15? Same thing, except this list now includes punk bands. Do you listen to the same bands you did growing up? Yesssssss. Were your parents cool parents or were they strict? Abusively strict. Have you ever been in a car accident? Minor ones. The cars involved only had small dents. What was your favorite food as a kid? Corndogs. What is it now? Still corndogs, but now I like chicken curry and pizza and street food and pasta.

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