whynot: Once Upon a Time in Mexico: malaguena salerosa (up in lights)
 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.

sup mom

May. 3rd, 2017 08:08 pm
whynot: SPN: surprise!Indonesia (all in the family)
 the mother’s day promos are out in full swing. i have been carrying around in my head the simple fact that most tangible way my mom is still in my life is through makeup. she bought me a clinique lipstick in ‘blushing nude’. it’s my perfect everyday shade. i bought a backup ‘cos i thought the first was about to run out, but it never seems to run out.

other things she gave me that i still have:

neutrogena healthy skin compact foundation in classic ivory - i don’t wear foundation, so i’ve only just begun to play around with this guy. maybe in the future i’ll start using foundation regularly, but rn i use it as a pore-filling primer ‘cos i’m usually too lazy to do a whole face

neutrogena healthy skin pressed powder in fair - used it to set concealer when i wear it, but i just bought a palette that has banana powder in it so we’ll see. both neutrogena products were for my wedding, which was very simple and very small. she probably bought them at target, which she loved and i think found novel because there are no targets back in the philippines & indonesia. 

- discontinued revlon blush. the mirror's broken. i should probably toss this, but i won't.

- skymall-exclusive lancome face palette. most of the pressed powders and eye stuff are kinda bad, except maybe the blush. the lipsticks are fine, but the palette sits in the bottom of the pile and i forget to use it


things she didn't give me but that i'll probably associate with her forever:

- that trendy shimmery lip color that's red with some blue in it. it looked good on her no matter what she wore. i want to pull off this color but i have nowhere to wear this kind of color to. mom didn't care, she'd just wear it everywhere and rocked it

- estee lauder's pleasures - floral, so not really my thing, but pretty. my mom smelled like this going to events

- davidoff's cool water - i love love LOVE how this smells. fresh aqua vibes. i probably would never wear it, though. too much association with mom.


i don't know why i wrote this, except that i've been getting into makeup and skin care, which my mom probably would've appreciated if she were still alive or if i had developed this interest at a younger age. i didn't give a shit about that kind of stuff when i was a kid, which i think irked her somewhat. she and i didn't have the best relationship, but she's dead now and it's gonna be mother's day soon, and for some reason this is what came out. remembering my mom through my new hobby.

whynot: etc: oh deer (Default)
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.
whynot: etc: excuses, excuses (express yourself)
This weekend was the first time the band practiced without special guests. It's been a veritable parade of relatives and high-school friends, and on Friday night, after Jack and I wound our way back from the Cape in a new car we bought from a little old lady on the cheap ("just drove it to church and back on Sundays", and the dome lights don't work), the three of us coalesced together again. Jason, Jack, and me - half-ragged hypostases, triune god of going nowhere fast. Here we are again, we said to each other. If ever I end up waking up grimy-eyed at 5 AM in the backseat of a car speeding across the southwestern desert, pursued by the law, I have no doubt that Jack's gonna be the one behind the wheel and Jason will be riding shotgun. They'll be arguing the details of a decade-old memory, what happened back in high school, that one time in Mr. O'Brian's class. Something completely innocuous. Cans of Red Bull in the footwell, and the constant battle to quit cigarettes currently put on hold.

We are, I suspect, becoming a little codependent. Are we musicians who just get fucked up? Or are we fuck-ups who like playing music? We call it band practice but we never practice for anything. We're not pursuing gigs, not even open mics. Come weekend nights, we're squeezed into the guest bedroom tangled up in each other's wires, two beers in and singing other people's heartbreak. Every so often, we remind ourselves that we're better than this. The sentiment never lasts, but the inertia does.

It was the three of us again this weekend and we had been waiting for it, it's so easy, litany of things we can sing in our sleep, and all we want is easy. Let's play this song, let's play that song, and the indecision in-between that leads to noncommittal noodling and a rambling jam. It's not that we're good. It's not that we aren't offensive and lazy and inconsiderate to each other. We're a well-oiled machine that does nothing much. We will simmer and give up and control, but there's some feeble light of dawn when the dust clears. We are in our simplest form. We love each other. This solves nothing. Love is no panacaea, but neither is the dawn; you just know that both are inevitable, that's all.
whynot: SPN: surprise!Indonesia (all in the family)
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! )
whynot: etc: oh deer (motherfucking pendragons)
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. )

[originally posted at http://whynot.dreamwidth.org/32345.html | comment count unavailable comments]
whynot: etc: excuses, excuses (express yourself)
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. )
whynot: etc: oh deer (AWOOGA)
1. Two lovely erasures have already been posted to [livejournal.com profile] erasureathon! And joy of joys, they're erasures of my fic! [livejournal.com profile] sgrio made the specific into the communal in parádeisos, an erasure of my Narnia fic about movieverse!Glozelle, and rendered the cracked out intimate in ménage à trois, which is an erasure of my Leverage fic about the time Parker got turned into a ceramic cat. idk, it was a [livejournal.com profile] comment_fic prompt okay.

2. Okay, I give in. I have a Twitter. That's right, SITERLAS, because Psych is giving me a complex apparently. All you tweeters, put your lights on.

3. [livejournal.com profile] isurrendered is having an episode-reaction post party for all our nonexistent shows. It's gonna be a weekly thing. I just... I cannot love this comm more if I tried. If real reactions to fake episodes, then what next? Reviews of our fake shows? Drinking games for our fake episodes? Fandom Wank posts of our fake shows' fandoms?

4. I'm getting my friend hooked on the demon blood, so for Valentine's Day we drank wine and watched Supernatural, now known to us as, "THE DEAN SHOW and sam i guess". Then we got distracted for twenty years by this picture. (STOP IT, ACKLES, I NEED MY BRAIN TO DO THINGS.) I cannot wait to ruin her life with fic.

5. Today was extremely bewildering! Every time something terrible and world-ending happened (which today was surprisingly often! courstesy of immigration bureaucracy), there was an equally happy and helpful solution that solved the problem! Talk about mood whiplash. This happened all day! AWFUL NEWS, AWESOME NEWS, AWFUL NEWS, AWESOME NEWS, aaaahhhhh. I'm not out of the woods yet, but forgive me if I'm just gonna spend the rest of the night eating Sour Patch Kids and orange-infused dark chocolate.
whynot: etc: oh deer (i'll stop the world)
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
whynot: etc: oh deer (AWOOGA)
Have you guys ever had a virus that refuses to let a laptop shut down? How about one that, when you click on a Google search result, takes you to an ad instead of the site? This just happens in Google, though. You end up having to copy the search result URL and pasting it into the address bar. The search results from other search engines click fine. So anyway, neither your malware scanner nor your regular virus scan can detect this virus, and you suspiciously can't install Windows Defender. And sometimes tabs would just open randomly with more ads.



Bring out your dancing shoes, IT department, you've got a date with my pig's feces of a laptop. DON'T STEP IN ANY, NOW.

The 3-sentence ficathon now has a delicious directory! And it's still going on and on and on! Narnia appears to be the most popular fandom by far, followed by... crossover, and then by STXI and Dr. Who. COME PLAY. Add more fandoms!

My 3-sentence fics in the following fandoms: Sailor Moon, Peter Pan/Star Trek, Ocean's 11, Skins, geometry )

And now for everyone's favorite game: 2 links and a YouTube embed!

1) Awesome or terrifying? Would you sleep in it?
2) There is a Merlin AU crackfic in here somewhere.
3) Live-action country village rendition of the opening credits of The Simpsons, by Estonia's TV3.


Burgeoning paranoia #439898: I have too many names! It's getting all mixed up! More than once now I have almost sent emails to my thesis advisor with, like, "love, [high school nickname]", or to a potential employer with "cheers, Lassiter", or to my professor with "love you, [boyfriend's pet name for me]". What is this, the revenge of my compartmentalized personae? One day this is going to happen, and it's going to be terrible and hilarious. D:

ETA: HOLY SHIT BACON JAM. ...wtf bacon lampshade?
ETA2: WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THESE BEST BUY POPUPS, LJ??? >:-(
whynot: etc: oh deer (applied phlebotinum)
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.
whynot: etc: oh deer (i'll stop the world)
OH MY HOLY FUCKING CRAP MY LAPTOP IS BACK

It is baaaaaaaaack. After a protracted period of warranty repairs, exacerbated by my apparent inability to deal with billing problems in a timely manner, my terrible snookums is back. I'm still probably going to continue to be kind of scarce around here, on account of OMGWTFJOBSEARCH and theeeeesiiiiiis. In fact, gratuitous to-do list time! )

And okay, I watched the last two Merlins and my thoughts are simple. )

I keep thinking I want to read or write fic for Ocean Girl, but of what? Because it's a closed canon with this grand mytharc or whatever, I wanna wait until I finish watching it before I start fiddling around. Here are some Ocean Girl bunnies anyway. )

I'm wondering now if I ought to reapply for Yuletide with Ocean Girl. Speaking of Yuletide blips, the Jonny Quest and The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest both have Jessie Bannon on their characters list when she only appears in the latter. I'm only signed up for the former. Is it worth it going back and signing up for both? How much do I want Jonny/Jessie/Hadji OT3 action?

Watched the V pilot. It looks promising, or maybe I just have a huge crush on Juliet Elizabeth Mitchell.

I also have to finish up the '7 days of joy' meme that I started like 2 months ago. The last category is 'whatever tickles your fancy'. Whatever tickles my fancy right now happens to be my favorite things from my 'My Pictures' folder.

<333: a miscellany )
whynot: etc: oh deer (veins and arteries)
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 [livejournal.com profile] heather11483 and [livejournal.com profile] 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.
whynot: etc: oh deer (Default)
Let's play Good News Bad News and Tangent!

BAD NEWS: Updating project descriptions sucks like a vacuum and omfg there are three more hours on the clock UGH THAT IS PRACTICALLY FOREVER.

GOOD NEWS: Office is closing early!

BAD NEWS: ...because a typhoon is coming.

GOOD NEWS: Waiting for my ride to come, I'm tooling around on Cracked, as one does, and discover that, once upon a time, Kirk and Spock had to fight the mafia in space. What in the whaaaaaat. YOU GUYS. Can you imagine this with the Reboot cast? jhfjkhf. Speaking of strange things The Shat has done, there is also a spoken-word song called "In Love" in collaboration with Ben Folds.

TANGENT: Every fandom needs a mafia AU. How about the one where Uther Pendragon is Vito Corleone the don of all dons, and what Arthur really wants to do is go legit, but Uther goes on about legacy and duty, and shoves that in Arthur's face. Camelot Nostra! ) I really should've signed up for [livejournal.com profile] reel_merlin.
whynot: etc: oh deer (Default)
-- 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.

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