all my keysmash are belong to you

 1. retirement for my dad isn't relaxation. that doesn't seem to be his dream. the dreams he is realizing, the ones he's pursuing now that he has the time and funds to, is to serve. in his twilight years, he seems to be getting his internal ducks in a row. finding order, finding peace in this way. he's working on a panel that approves climate change grants in southeast asia. he gives workshops to university students on how to improve their grant proposals for future projects. he's donating our old house to an orphanage and naming it for my mom, in honor of my grandparents. this moves me. i didn't get along with my mom, but i predict my dad will go through the rest of his life naming every good and beautiful thing in his life for her. our house, the stars, the sea - he'll call them by her name just so she is still in this world with him. the stars come back every night. the waters rise. he knows this. that's why he persists.

2. and then me. and then my love, and all the things i'd name for him. isn't it rude to want to measure joy? i'm curious yet content. a handful of secret names and a collection of habits curated over the course of almost half a life. the habit of constant and casual intimacy. my hand sliding along his forearm as i pass by. eye contact across a room then we kiss the air at each other at the exact same time because that's what muscle memory does. a certain angle of the head means kiss me. a casual kiss on the forehead as we carry dirty glasses to the kitchen is a thoughtless throwaway thing, too ubiquitous to be high in value. but we value it, which is the same as how we have it, which is the same thing as years of learning how to do this, knowing we'll never get it perfect but too deeply a part of one another to care. the bedroom is a mess. i like to hold him when the sun flickers gold on our white walls. i like to hold him when i can hear the rain outside. all my favorite stories are now rooted in this. a long-learned guilt says it's arrogance, that one day i'll pay for all this happiness. everyone who ever resented me will rejoice when i am hurt. i can't stop it; it leaks through in my beliefs. it leaks through in the stories i tell. i love you, i'm home. i love you i love you i love you and i'm home. if i keep this at arm's length for fear of losing it, i'll regret it. i know i'll regret it. he wakes up to kiss me, then burrows into my neck and goes back to sleep. this is what i use to remind me that life goes on, that it waits for me no matter what. and that's why i persist.

should be going to bed but i'm probably going to finish this episode of peaky blinders, this last one, 'cos it's a half day tomorrow anyway. pulling a joe, haha; he justifies late nights thusly. just gonna sit here and ponder death. joe and i joke about "haha i'm going to die before you do, then YOU'LL have to be sad instead of me haha!" and i've been in that headspace from a darker slant. i think my mom's dying. my friend gave me a book, that ny best seller comic that's a memoir about the artist's parents aging and dying. the artist's senile mother talks about conversing with her dead brother , and her caretaker says, "every time i hear her talking to her dead brother, i see a shadow on the bed."

my parents tell me these stories. a week before my grandmother died, she insisted she saw my grandfather in the yard. my grandmother's friend explained that he had come to pick her up, to see her safe passage. forty days after my grandfather died, my dad kept smelling the scent of a particular flower. it was no flower near where he was. it was the scent of the flowers that grew in the cemetery where his father was buried. forty days after someone's death is important in his religion. there is a ceremony; there are prayers. that night my dad dreamed that he walked through a garden with his father. the next day he told his friends and family this dream and they all said the same thing: his father had come to visit him, to make sure he was okay.

i don't have strong beliefs about the afterlife out of a deep-seated anxiety about being wrong about it. but i am moved by how death can push love to the forefront. death as a reminder of love. i will be irritated by anyone dismissing my family's grief through empiricism and rationalism, even though i cannot say whether i agree 100% to the exact alignment of my family's beliefs. i don't know. my grandmother was widowed at 21 with three children. her husband died in battle. his portrait hung in the first house i ever lived in and i have memorized his face, black and white and somber and young. my grandmother had to wait a long time to see him again. i hope they're happy, i think. i don't know.

My fascination with caves probably began with Planet Earth's "Caves" episode. That and "Ocean Deep" are my favorites because jesus motherfuck, evolution gets up to some crazy shit when you deprive nature of sunlight. Eyeless salamanders and vampire squid all up in my business. But it's not just the weirdo animals -- there's something about caves I find aesthetically compelling. Can't quite pinpoint why. I just have these images that I find appealing: underground waterfalls, underground lakes that go for miles, creatures that are sleeping, creatures that are waiting, and a network of caverns like a three-dimensional maze where you're playing the most dangerous game. Dean and the shadows hunting each other in the caves beneath Tennessee. Castiel standing on the shore of a great lake, waiting for an answer, or a barge, a Charon figure who will tell him that his father hasn't been seen in hundreds of years.

In a way it's kind of the opposite of my romanticization of the desert. The desert is about the desperation of empty space. The cave is about the panicked buzz of claustrophobia. When you are trapped in either, you are forced to confront yourself. The desert does it by stripping everything down to the bone. The cave does it by drowning you.

This is all just a shmancy way of saying, "Hey, look at my vacation pictures."

( Caves! )

Hi, all you folks who have Blackberry phones or another smartphone, here are questions from someone who is considering getting one. Do you like your Blackberry? IS IT WORTH THE $75 A MONTH D:?? If you have some other Verizon smartphone, which do you have and what do you like/hate about it?

Still homeless and looking (ARGH). Still seeking out health insurance (DOUBLE ARGH). Thank you to everyone for their help and hugs and <333, I'll get back to y'all soon. In the meantime, check it, I recced Novaks at SOR.

Another thing that has been soothing my woes is how sarcasticindiefucks is totally all about SPN. Cas after he drank the liquor store, Uriel at Sodom and Gomorrah, fallen!Cas, Jimmy, AND MORE. Why does tumblr have to exist when I'm trying to get shit done?

Keep calm and repost Wincest commentfic.


By Songs Entombed
Supernatural. Sam/Dean. R.
4x14 coda. They haven't done this in a while. ~600 words

( He mutters some bullshit about how he's tired. )

I rewatched Prince Caspian with a friend who has never seen it before, and she was like, "Caspian should stop looking back all the time." Word.

Since I am literally on the other side of the world from my family, I am spending the holiday with the boy's. One of the show-stoppers of the Christmas party was his uncle giving his other uncle Weener Kleener Soap. You could hear the record scratch to a halt and everyone went "WHAAA?" and gathered round to take a gander at it, competing to see who could make the dirtiest joke. Then (unrelatedly) I talked with his grandmother about breakdancing. These people <3333

Yuletide-wise, there are so many interesting fandoms that I'm overwhelmed. Hiphop RPF? YES PLS. The old Scooby Doo cartoons?? FUTURAMA AND SECRET GARDEN?? omggggg. OMG IT'S ALWAYS FUCKING SUNNY IN MOTHERFUCKING PHILADELPHIA!!!! \o/

Under the cut are my Dreamwidth updates in Narnia RPF, Narnia, Merlin, and the Where The Wild Things Are movie. There are also 3 Yuletide recs in The Tudors, Oregon Trail, and The Sound of Music.

( links to things to read )

So GUESS WHICH YULETIDE FIC I WROTE.

Here it is, your moment of zen:


via Made of Gold

I rewatched most of 'Back to the Future' last night and let me tell you, ( the friendship between Marty McFly and Emmet Brown is an epic one that transcends time and space. )

I think half the flist has seen this, but if you haven't: what is manpain? Also, the latest xkcd is especially relevant to my interests.

jfsldfjds a friend of a friend is like, "Hey, come up on Saturday and jam with me and some people because I'm trying to put together a performance about female voices/sounds." And I don't understand why I am considering saying no?! ( Pros and cons! ) I really should go, shouldn't I.

I reckon I should be organizing my data sets, but then I listened to Chimamanda Adichie talk about the dangers of a single story (via heather11483 and deepad) and my heart just swelled. I was originally going to flock this post because it has a lot of personal information in it, but then I realized that would be kind of defeating the point. So, here it is.

( thoughts on my own stories: the ones I couldn't own, the ones I didn't want to own, the ones I had to fight for, the ones I still have to fight for )

So in the spirit of this, I'm gonna do new twist on an old meme. I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away. And I will answer in autobiographical narrative form.

-- People say "he's the kind of person you want handling your money" the way people say "he's kind of a dick".

-- I skipped ahead to the episode of The Tudors with Katie McGrath in it. She was in it for less than a minute. Jonathan Rhys Meyers meets her in a forest, then screws her doggie-style. THE END.


-- Because it DOESN'T STOP, I started pondering a conference admin AU. Morgana negotiating with Uther (who is at HQ in another country) over the phone saying that the delegation from wherever also wants to be reimbursed for X and Y, and Uther is like, "HAHAHA TELL ME ANOTHER ONE." And when a delegate goes overtime for his speech, Gwen is the one who smiles really big and cuts in, "Thank you, that was lovely! And now we will relocate for lunch."

Will is the intern. He wanted to watch the panels, and Arthur said he could, but somehow he ended up spending the whole afternoon photocopying boarding passes and faxing affidavits to Dusseldorf. Poor Lass Will. :(

Arthur, head organizer, confronts Merlin and says, "It's wonderful that you've taken on the intern and are helping him settle into all this, but remember you are NOT his task sponge. I don't want you running around with the attendance sheet and confirming their field day activities or whatever -- that's Will's job. You're the rapporteur. You have your own tasks to do." Finger wagging in Merlin's face and everything. "And you still haven't turned in a draft of the outline!"

But Arthur still sees Will and Merlin taking their cigarette breaks together and god, don't they know that cigarettes are bad for their health? If Arthur smoked, he could totally be out there with Merlin, with them, laughing about whatever, but he DOESN'T smoke, because cigarettes are NASTY, and if Merlin can't see that then well, that's not Arthur's problem. Now where the fuck are those evaluation forms?

"You asked for these?" Gwen says, and hands Arthur twenty photocopies of the evaluation form. God, he loves her.