Category: throwback thursday

A buffer of Stuff I’ve Written Before. I won’t tell if you won’t.

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2015-02-27 (It was also posted to StoriesPortal, ne’e TaleVault, but as of this posting I’ve been unable to bring up the site.)

“What the hell did I just watch!?”

I shut off the television in disgust. That was it? Is that what this… Disney… had to offer me? Awful, just awful.

At least that Danish Andersen fellow had the sense to make the sea witch not give a fuck. You want the thing? Here’s the price. Steep, but fair– the price fitting for the intent. That’s how we roll.

But this?

They made her outright evil. A vindictive thing that wanted power. She was gorgeous but she outright conned those merfolk, stacking the cards against them. And for what? Shits and giggles. What a fucking shyster.

And the fact that Ursula was fat AND a bad guy was not lost on me. They ain’t even subtle.

No wonder I couldn’t get much business anymore. This drivel was dripping from the land and into my undercurrents. It pisses me off. If these landlubbers were eating this stuff up, you know the merfolk are too. The superficial stuff like looks, not so much, but my last customer was terrified I’d turn her into coral or something.

I’ve wondered why, and now I know.

Also the obligatory , but damn.

Which is why I’m sitting in my seaside condo seriously considering cursing my neighbor. “Oh, you’ll like this movie!” Damn ho don’t know me at all. Because not only did they tarnish the reputation of sea witches, but there was a happy ending.

I hate contrived happy endings like this. Someone should have suffered a little more. The prince should have been struck blind, like in that other fairy tale with the thorns.

Okay, Yung. Deep breath. She only meant well.

At least the musical numbers were on point, though. Ursula had some pipes on her.

I sighed, and pop in the sequel… or prequel, whatever. Disney made a ton of these things. Another evil sea witch (sister?), probably more songs.

Business is slow, so I might as well trudge along with watching these.

BONUS: Poetry. That’s What You Get (For Walking On Land) / To Ariel

2015-02-01, which inspired the above story. If you haven’t noticed, I’m a big fan of The Little Mermaid and its fanfiction- esp. when messing with the Disney version.

Chalk it up to mere vindictiveness,
A nastiness,
Jealousy–
And every stereotype a sea witch can offer
While being impossible to scrub clean with
Disneyification
(nudity and oral sex and rough words and hedonism and technicalities,
just the sort fanfiction writers love to write about)
But:

I’m still stewing over the fact that you got away–
That, while my precious girl was happy for a while–
Her homage got a happily ever after.
For fuck’s sake,
I cursed Dumbo instead because you are out of reach.
So let me try this the old-fashioned way with illwishing
(and limericks, I guess).

It doesn’t sound too bad– if you’re naive.
You don’t know how crushing yearning can be
Unless you’ve been there,
Honey.
And we’ve all been there, haven’t we?

Yet I can’t bring myself to be too harsh.
But, this is just the flavor
Of curses
That I like.
So I hope you hear this:

I hope not that each step’ll be full of knives,
But each time someone looks at you
In longing
Your knees’ll crumble and you’ll be unable
To walk
For days.

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This was a draft for 2020-01-01 that I never posted.


I stayed in this year. After work, I was so tired. I stayed home with my nesting partners, played video games, and watched more Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. I drank a mimosa with a lover once the clock struck twelve, and kissed everyone I could.


I’m rolling out the accolades, still. “Happy New Year!” with a shitton of emojis. We did it. Another year. Let’s make this year even better.


And yet, I am sad.


I open up Discord and there’s names that have been grey to me for months. I’m still not over my friend’s passing. I’m dreading work drudgery tomorrow. I’m worried about a childhood friend. Deadlines are looming. Were we even missed? More adulting this weekend. Plans being made.


I keep backspacing.


I’m stumped. I don’t know if I should say any more.


I’ve until midnight to dole out my “Happy New Year”s.


We’ve got time.


Maybe this would work better as a poem.


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Throwback Thursday: a note on Feb 5, 2018.


Fang: [Vanille]’s a crybaby, though! She cries as soon as she gets lonely or insecure. But if I stroke her head, she stops as if nothing is wrong.

Lebreau: In that case, you’ll need to find her quickly and pat her on the head.

Fang: Yup.

Final Fantasy XIII


I keep saying I need to get back to journaling, or at least blogging,
because I’ve been through a ton of emotions and trying to process them
is a delightful and horrifying blur. Part of it is just me being me, and
part of it is because I rewatched Star Wars: The Last Jedi and seeing
Carrie Fisher up there sets off a deluge.


That, and.


I’m surrounded by people that not only like me, but a few also love me. And even a few more that want to spend time with me.


And each connection is something different.


And some connections are still here, still loving me.


That, and.


I’m still broken, and I’m still fucking up, and I still hear the
voice in my head telling me that people will stop loving me the moment
they realize how broken I am, or. They’re going to discard me the
instant I make one mistake because that’s happened so many times


but the voice is… manageable. Sometimes. More, sometimes.


That, and.


I’m recognizing the voice’s tricks. Sometimes, it doesn’t help much. But there’s power to naming and recognizing something.


That, and.


I’ve been healing in interesting ways. But it’s been slow. It’s been
clumsy. I’m sorry. I’ve changed. I don’t really know me from before. I’m
an echo.


That, and.


I’m overdue for a good cry, actually.


That, and.


I wonder if– no, when, as it’s been predicted, if you believe in that sort of thing– I’ll start using my gills, too. I do when I have to. I still come up for air.


But. (“Strike that. Reverse it.”)


I dive instead, and refuse to come up for hours. And sometimes I can’t I’m this fragile fish that’ll melt if I get too close to the surface.


That, and.


I want to try everything everything everything though my shy soul balks the entire time. As shy souls do. Xie’ll let me know when I’m (not) ready.


That, and.


I’m contradictions and multitudes, damn it. Yet I still exist. And I am valid. Gills and lungs. I love the shore. I will go to it. I adore the deep, too. I’ll go back to it.


That, and.


. Sometimes the best thing you can do is survive. Pray someone swoops in and knocks you out of the way because you are more than a sacrifice.


That, and.


I could use a pat on the head right now. But I’m in solitude, for I need to rest and heal. Listening to my body. Surviving.


I’m tired. I’m tired of thinking.


But I’ll come up for air in a few days.


You can pat me on the head then, and I’ll pat yours.

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Throwback Thursday: Originally posted to the VerboseTerse instance at Mon, 29 Oct 2018 03:45:51. This may also look familiar if you follow me on a certain social media site with a black background.


“Singular they,” I say. “Those are my pronouns.”[1]


Very recently I’ve come against some resistance with my pronouns… but not quite in the way you’d think. There was no malice, and confusion took its place.


For context, I’m American. And on top of that, I’m mono-lingual and the only language I’m fluent in is English. It took the other party voluntarily disclosing that English was their second language for me to have a “light bulb moment.”


And when I was confronted, again, with “but they is plural!” at a local gaming event soon after, I was able to recognize that same confusion.


“Hang on. Is English your native language?”


It was not.


Instead of refuting the many tired arguments as to why someone wouldn’t want to use Singular They[2], I was forced to consider a different tactic.



One major take-away from these interactions was more of a reminder of how classrooms can be horribly rigid in what they teach. Especially when it comes to English. When I was in the school system it never seemed to allow for nuances of different dialects and cultures, linguistic drift, and (yeah imma go here right quick) creativity. It appears that that hasn’t changed.


So ESL students go in the classroom, and come out with these preconceived notions of how English should work, only for the language itself to generally throw curveballs at you anyway.


Trust me. If it wasn’t going to be my Singular They/Them pronouns, it would have been something else. The Habitual Be. The Appalachian drawl. The ongoing war of Soda Vs. Pop. And English just being a fucking weird language on its own.


And no language is static unless it is dead.


My advice? Practice. Keep an ear out for cues. Immerse yourself in different, real environments. Do some readin’, here for example. Ask respectful questions.


Don’t beat yourself up when (yes, when) you screw up. We all do, even us native speakers, because there’s also the deprogramming of binary gender constructs to consider.[3]


Practice. It gets easier in time, honest.


And uh, sorry you had to learn this the hard way.



[1] I also use a set of neo-pronouns (zie/hir), but they are not the focus of this piece.


[2] “It’s not grammatically correct!” is a fairly common one, as well as the claim that “no one ever uses it.” But, you know, sometimes someone just uses that as an excuse to be an unaccommodating buttmunch.


[3] And this’ll be a whole can of worms for another time.

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This is a rough month for me. I associate it with not enough Good Memories and too many Bad Memories.


This Friday, October 11th (or is it Saturday?), is .


I came out once, on Facebook, a few years ago. Under a filter to people I felt would accept me. I still miscalculated.


I lost a friend.


It could’ve been way worse, but it still hurts a little. She was dear to me.


Here’s everything I couldn’t say in response to her last message to me… because she needed the last word so badly I was blocked. (You can infer what she said).


A little cleaned up, of course. But not by much.



Funny thing, about silence. It’s like an empty spot on a Mad Libs sheet. You can fill it in with whatever you like. But let’s set the record straight: I did not unfriend you out of jealousy.


I left quietly, because I’ve not a lot to say. We cannot go back to what we once were; I cannot continue our superficial banter, and you’ve proven to me that I cannot open up to you. I’ve tried, for what’s another acquaintance on the kiddie pool? But I’m older, and I grow weary of too much of that. I left silently, because I’ve little nice to say about people who can’t see beyond what 4chan and Reddit hate. I was silent because out of all the options, shutting my mouth was the kindest. Better you think we just grew apart and were a casualty of my biyearly FB cleaning, as it happens sometimes. And I remained silent because if you actually gave a shit, you would’ve asked how I was without the unfriending to kick your voyeurism into overdrive.


Another thing about silence is…
sooner or later, someone will start babbling to break it. Then you’ll
know how they really are.


And you just had to be a _________.
(Put whatever you like, there. I love Mad Libs!)


My initial thought was “Was that fucking necessary?!” But… You know what? I’ll let you have that. It’s on me for forgetting the maxim “hurt people hurt people.” And while I was merely taking a break from FB, I also guessed that you not knowing what I was up to would’ve driven you nuts. So I’ll own that.


Clearly, I struck a nerve. And I’ll no longer commend you for your maneuver; looking back now it was just straight-up pathetic, though calculated:


  1. You really are that shallow, using superficial insults against the people that stood up for me. And you knew that any slights against the people I care about, no matter how grade-school level, is one of the quickest ways to get a rise out of me.
  2. In addition to said shallowness, you managed to land a critical hit. All I’ll say is I’m not on a trajectory that’ll not pass people’s rigged expectations of me, and I’ve yet to de-condition myself of comparing my life to others. You really know how to twist the knife in one’s insecurities!
  3. You’re the very troll you accuse my friends of being. Try not to choke on the irony; now that my anger is largely dissipated I actually want you to live.
  4. Despite all of your warnings, turns out that the person that has done the most damage to me was you. You broke my heart. Even [name redacted] could not have accomplished that on her most destructive day… and no one else ever could. So take solace in that.


I assume I’m not giving you too much credit– you’re fuckin’ smart. But I gotta dock points from your final score for unoriginality. Oh goodness, sizism/lookism and a line borrowed from /r/TumblrInAction? Haven’t heard that before!


I’m just… reeling over the fact that someone so talented, so beautiful, and so capable of good things can be so… needlessly ugly and hopelessly shallow.


I guess we’ve mutually disappointed one another. I’m fine with that.


I’m not jealous. I pity you. As you continue to stagnate, only growing in your circlejerk of a sheltered pond, you’ll hurt more people like me and sabotage any potential happiness you may have with others because they’ll fail your narrow and short-sighted criteria.


And I’ll keep doin’ me, whatever the fuck that is.


There’s no point in wishing ill will, or gunning for friends. Besides, that’s not my style; I tend to default to the classics.


I’ll do better than you and wish the opposite: be well. Have a nice life– and you will. People like you always do, anyway.


But you can also go fuck yourself.



(I gave her a 7/10, by the way. She got me to reply. And I still think about it sometimes.)


I’ll write a more recent coming-out post this week. A happier one. Later I’ll reflect more on the positives:


I learned who my true friends were and realized what tangible support I needed, going forward. And I know that if people can’t accept me, I must lose them no matter what we’ve gone through together; it’ll hurt for a while but that is fine. And sometimes closure doesn’t happen and I have to accept that.


But I can still rant on the Internet. (:

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Throwback Thursday: this was originally written Wed, 31 May 2017 01:00:50 +0000, on the VerboseTerse instance of this blog.


I wonder about you a lot, especially when I’m writing. I followed all of your blogs and keep coming back to my favorite posts.


Wondering things, like:


Do you still use the black and white composition books for journals? I’m afraid I’ve fallen out of use for them – the lines too wide and the notebook too big and cumbersome. Moleskeine seems to have won me over, but I’ve yet to find a notebook that gives me the same feeling those did. (I can’t even describe the feeling. Go figure. Probably Nostalgia’s older sibling.)


What about Sharpie? Do you have a favorite pen? I love the Papermate Inkjoy gels, but the RSVP pens are my forever faves.


Remember Livejournal? I was still there long after you left. Well I’m on Dreamwidth now, their latest fuckup being the last straw. I miss that Kao Kitty mood theme I associate with you.


I’m sorry blogging feels like work now when you’re also blogging as your work. (Wow, that’s a clumsy sentence.) I wish I had some advice. But I know what you’re going through. It’s been a long time since I’ve done designing or HTML shenanigans for fun. (And now that I have ye typical drudgery almost-9-to-5, I don’t have that excuse anymore. But, habits.)


You find it difficult to write sometimes, right? Me too. As you can attest to this quiet blog.


What about bullet journaling? Do you incorporate a system like that, the washi tape and 1,000 colord (sic) pens and markers and highlighters and stickers completely optional? What about just doodlin’?


Ever do any more poetry? I still do. I’m glad for it, and glad I haven’t fallen out of the habit. (Remind me to elaborate on this later, self.)


Well, anyway. Sorry for all the questions.


I hope you’re well friend. And keep writing.