theladywanderer | Recent Entries

Thank you so much for signing up to participate in this year's exchange. I appreciate and enjoy everything everyone creates every year and I can't wait to see what you decide to write. Additionally, I am open to treats if you feel so inspired.

I do want to warn you that, although I am able to post on time, the end of the year also happens to feature some heavy events for me and my family. This means that I generally don't get around to reading Yuletide gifts until well into the New Year. Please do not feel discouraged by a lack of or a delayed response—it truly is a treat to see what each new round of this exchange brings and I am so, so appreciative each time.

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Hello, and thank you for participating in Yuletide this year. Below are some thoughts, noodles, and opinions about the fandoms and characters requested, which you are free to take or leave as you will, outside of the DNWs.

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One of these years, I'll actually have my shit together at the time assignments go out to have this actually ready.

Thank you so, so much for participating in Yuletide this year, and for unwittingly signing up to deal with my tired, forgetful self.

~~~

Alpha & Omega — Leah Cornick

Ah, Leah. What a fantastic bitch of a woman. Truly loved the focus on her and her backstory this time around the ol' book train, and would appreciate some more of that, please and thanks. Have fun. Be mean.

Some thought noodles:

She and Bran are...strained, at best. Be tense.
Leah, on an icily competent visit to Wal-Mart
Show the gap between utter disaster and Bran finding her.

Luminous Dead — Gyre Price, Em Arasgain

Have you ever been anxious and afraid? Because that was this whole reading experience for me, plus a healthy dose of remembering why I hate being underground. Em and Gyre's relationship is assn at such a distance, under such a huge strain. I'd love to see the evolution/future of this partnership, or the aftermath of nearly going banonkers in a murder cave.

Some brain noodles:

They cave again. It's better this time. Slightly.
Em is, like, the Minotaur at the center of the (cave) maze, and Gyre is Theseus. Neither realize it.
The horta is involved. Somehow.
They meet somewhere entirely mundane. The lights are fully on. It's still ominous.

Murderbot — Murderbot, Worldbuilding

Idk man, just talk about some robot feelings.

Some brain noodles:

Get academic with it, talk about what defines consciousness and who gets to decide those parameters.
Write the 50¢ Bantam paperback novelization of literally any space soap.
Go into detail about what, exactly, made all those artifacts they're so squirrelly about digging up.

Nailed It! — Nicole Byer, Jacques Torres, Wes

This stupid little Netflix program is, quite literally, one of the few things that brought me pure, uncomplicated glee in this, the year 2 P.T. (Pandemic Time). Please, be as silly with this as you can personally stomach.

Some brain noodles:

Gingerbread mansions. Glue is used. It is not supposed to be.
Baked Alaska, but in Jell-O. It's still binworthy.
Turducken, but cake. They all fit together, but they all come apart.

Persuasion — Anne Elliot, Frederick Wentworth

Sometimes, okay, you just want to pine after someone. Think about the gaps they left, the things you want to tell them, the warmth you're missing. Like grief, but self-made.

Some brain noodles:

Anne is a lumberjack. This is as far as I got before shorting out.
Wentworth is a ghost haunting Kellynch. Anne leaves. The house mourns.
Something maudlin about selkies and being lost to the sea.

Rivers of London — Beverley Brook, Peter Grant, Thomas Nightingale

Love a trio. Fond of a bit of weird, a smidge of mystery, a spot of grim determination to keep going when all else is lost. Would love to see these three lean on and support each other, maybe investigate some oddities, eat a plate of chips, make out, whatever.

Some brain noodles:

Nightingale is a nightclub singer. Bev owns the place. Peter stumbles in one night, drawn by the sweetly piercing trumpet and caught by two sets of eyes.
Bev & Peter are thieves. Nightingale encounters them (curator? guard? owner? investigator?). Stuff.
Just some weirdness. Bev makes pastries that act like Sophie's hats. Peter designs buildings that echo with silent jazz. Nightingale is haunted by the remnants of war and the unfinished business of the Folly's dead.

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: Johnny Leave Her - The High Kings

this is a work in progress, sorryyyyyyy

( BING BONG )

my girl's got about three hours left, and i think she knows it.

how can she not: she's had chips today--tostitos with a hint of lime--and all the popcorn i could responsibly throw at her. there's blues on the radio, harmonica wailing in the back of all our minds for the first time since he died, and we're all surrounding her, petting her, telling her she's a good lady, the best baby, our missy miss.

it's a deathbed visitation, a living wake, and still, when i forget about the utter failings of the back half of her body and the events of the last six months, it seems like just a normal afternoon. i'm laying down on the couch, she's on the floor beside me, and sometime, just after 4.30, he'll walk in through the door, work bag in hand.

she's in the other room. i can hear her breathing, heavy puffs of air pushing against the plastic we've had to lay down to protect the carpet. i sat with her earlier today--because sitting is all she can do--petting her on the head, down her back, pulling loose strands of fur to clump near her rear legs. they're so swollen right now--mom says it's water retention--even as her legs and tail look bonier than they ever have. she's always been our baby rhino, a force of nature, stubborn as the day is long, clever in a sneaky way, loyal to a fault.

i understand why this is happening. it's easy to comprehend in a way that so many things aren't. this, though, more than him or anyone else, seems so unfair. she deserves better. she deserves to go out with a bang, with a silent whoosh of air in the night, with a dramatic flop to the ground, a final nudge to a ball. not with her mostly blind, unable to stand up, back legs basically paralyzed, one leg slowly consumed by a spreading sore, weird ooze coming out of various places, a stomach licked raw because she can't reach far enough back to clean herself, mind trapped in a body that's already half a corpse. it's the one thing you ask for, the one thing you as a thing that is alive deserve: dignity in death, a chance to go out on your own terms, one final moment to call your own.

and she--god, all i can think is: her ears are still so, so soft, and 5.15 p.m. tomorrow is still, somehow, too, too soon.

death is a funny thing. even when you expect it, when the weight of it thumps at your back for near on four years, it has a habit of refusing to follow expected paths.

which is to say: i'm tired of it.

even during a pandemic, the fourth is for tradition.

it's for remembering to buy hot dogs at the grocery store while grabbing your mask from the passenger seat, celebrating steve rogers' birthday while reading about growing case numbers, listening to npr reporters recite the declaration of independence while scrolling past pictures of protesters on pennsylvania ave.

it's for random pop-boom-bangs all week, with showers of sparkles igniting near enough on the night of to remind you that there's still people out there, even if you haven't seen them in months.

it's for the sparkling firecrackers of the next-door neighbors, your brother going out to see friends once the sun goes down, for lighting candles just after nine because, goddammit, we'll have some kind of fire in here even if i have to set it myself.

it's for jumpy dogs, memories of sticky, crowded evenings on plastic-coated football fields, even stickier, crowded mornings, the sun beating down as the area's finest parade down main street, distributing cheap flags, free totes, melting candy, and the opportunity, just for a second, to really see something cool.

Current Mood: nostalgic

at the end of the day, what do we all want? what is the thing that grabs us, shakes us down, threatens us with eternal misery unless we have it, can produce it, can guarantee its presence and its continuation? it's one part impossible wishes and one part melancholy dreaming mixed with a healthy dose of a dog on the floor at your feet, a hot cup of tea on the table beside you, and an episode of star trek you've yet to see queued up. it's taking those dreams from before, those fuzzy-future hopes of being with people, going places, doing things, and making sure they don't fade, even as they've lost the ability to be realized.

it's been a little over six months. i still dream about him, keep coming up with increasingly improbable reasons for him to still be alive. i miss him. i miss him when i watch the news, when i check the weather, when i read a sports related clue in the crossword, when i make hot drinks, when the dogs do something silly, when i do laundry, when i read about interesting history, when i think about getting a new job, when my heart skips a beat, when i hear another old comedian he loved has died, when i need a level, when i have to carry my dog outside, when i need a hug.

especially when i need a hug.

Current Mood: melancholy
Current Music: Tuesday's Gone — Lynyrd Skynyrd

Dear white people,

Hi, I'm one of you. A bazillion generations of people who are concerningly pale mixed with a few who "just tan really dark" (read: like dry coffee stains on a napkin) boiled down into one white idiot with a computer. That's you, too, right? Cool, we've established some common ground.

So maybe, for once, you'll listen.

In moments like these—a phrase that should be unique, individual, calling to mind a single clear instance, an undeniable point of reference. Instead, it could refer to any of a hundred instances, any of a hundred crimes, any of a hundred summers that started not with a burst of joy but a flare of ever-simmering outrage.

In moments like these, it is important to remember the irrelevance of being all-inclusive in a verbal sense, of making sure that your semantics are precisely right, and, most importantly, of assuming that words and statements necessarily have an opposite.

That's right, I'm talking to you, #AllLivesMatter hashtagger, and you, #BlueLivesMatter Facebook group.

The point, the very essence, the goddamn undeniable reason for #BlackLivesMatter being the rallying cry of a movement is because apparently, that fact is not universally understood, that truth is not recognized by the system supposedly designed to uphold it, that reality does not match the one lived by Black people in America.

When was the last time you heard of a white man being choked to death by police? When was the last time you heard of police breaking into an apartment unannounced and shooting a white woman to death? When was the last time you heard of a white person running through a neighborhood getting shot by people who believed they might be a thief?

The answer to that is: never.

The reason for that is that—unlike George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, who were all Black Americans—white people are not systemically oppressed, stigmatized, ostracized, and brutalized by the society they live in.

Instead, white people—comfortable with this fact or not—built, maintain, reinforce, benefit from and contribute to a system of governance and policing that is designed to discriminate against people of color, most specifically and egregiously against Black people. The reason your hashtags are unhelpful and borderline disrespectful—along with other less polite descriptors—is that they take the realities of Black lives, of Black experiences in this country, hold them next to the struggles of white people, of non-Black women, of law enforcement employees, of any other of a host of options, and have the audacity to call them equal.

You can believe that all lives matter equally, sure. But that's not relevant right now. What's relevant is that Black lives are in danger, Black lives are being treated as disposable, Black lives aren't getting the respect and dignity that they deserve.

So save the sentiment for later. Much later. Learn how to say it in a way that isn't a knee-jerk reaction invalidating a cry for recognition and justice from a marginalized community because, just once, you feel like you weren't being represented. Despite the current configuration of our society, not everything is about you, and it's time we, as white people, shut up and did something about it.

Start with letting them speak, continue with raising them up and supporting then, finish by helping them dismantle the system that put us here in the first place.

Sincerely,

Someone who is tired

Current Mood: tired

first, we hit 'em with the "my fellow Americans". then! the pregnant pause—write that in, "pregnant pause—before we get started.

this is the time for the eagles and shit, the jets flying over, the reminder that, in the beginning, we were just a bunch of scrappy rich white men mad at other rich white men thinking they could tell us what to do. actually—and this is just coming to me now, this is fresh, hot off the presses Thinking right here—we've done that a couple times, once over taxes with an ocean between us, and once over the federal government's ability to decide a man's right to own another man with an imaginary line between us.

huh. moral victories all around, really.

now it's time for the sticky stuff, the problem, the situation facing us. "grave" is a good adjective, say "serious" a lot. bring back the pregnant pauses from the beginning. we got numbers? put in some numbers, really make 'em remember that they're still scared of the dark. it's hopeless, everyone. we're in the depths of despair. this, right here? this is rock bottom.

but!--and this is where shit gets good, okay, this is the pivot, the turn, the swell in the music--never fear! your government, which honestly has difficulty agreeing on the definition of "your" and "government", has a plan. or will have a plan. or has a plan to have a plan. whatever.

here's where we ask 'em to remember the last plan, and how good that went? remember how we definitely didn't commit war crimes, or invade a country on hearsay, or disrupt an entire region's power base for personal gain, or—and i can't stress this enough—commit anything that even smacks of a war crime? remember that?

"we're gonna do that, but better" is what we say. we're gonna remind you of the wpa, the tva, all that new deal stuff. we've got it in hand—or, at least, the idea of it. the inkling of it. the "vision of what the end result should be" of it.

it'll be great. trust us. trust me. trust eagles.

god bless america.

Current Mood: pessimistic
Current Music: Fortunate Son — Creedence Clearwater Revival

I watched--in the loosest sense of the term, it was by no means in one straight sitting--Star Trek's "The Menagerie" last night. Maybe the better word is "finished".

I finished "The Menagerie" last night. It's one of those that seems oddly fitting, if edging slightly into horror. A race of telepaths who can create illusory lives for themselves and any in their sphere of influence, and a man paralyzed, his mind trapped in a body that no longer responds to him. The reality is daunting, the illusion is disconcerting, and the episode itself condemns neither. It simply points out that the one thing that all humans have in common, the thing that makes them unsuitable for the Talosian's titular menagerie, is an ingrained dislike of being imprisoned, a need to be free, an inability to quietly sit in a cage. The fact that Christopher Pike is sitting right there, his body having become that prison for his mind is almost incidental.

Current Mood: melancholy
Current Music: It's Been A Long, Long Time — Kitty Kallen

i read howl in the wrong place.

or, maybe, i was the wrong person.

sitting in the aisle of a bookshop, bundled up against weather that hadn't made it indoors just yet, surrounded by people in pink hats and various states of cold, i found it. i searched it out, actually; a line had been going through my head, a phrase with context but no ending. i can't remember it now.

i read it alone, the floor hard, shelves digging into my back, the words incomprehensible as units but coherent as a whole, a run-on, a scream of grief and frustration that felt like it were coming from the next room over, blunted by the insulation of me not being right and me not being there.*

~~~

there's something about coming late to a struggle.

it almost causes you to doubt yourself, to wonder if, since you haven't experienced the horrors of your forerunners, you're actually deserving of being in this fight at all. you don't stop to think about how your lack of hurt and pain is sue to the blood and sweat of the people who came before, you don't sit and rationalize that, actually, you should be celebrating what freedoms you've gained instead of worrying about what restrictions you lack.

you think: are my feelings valid? am i really oppressed? does the weight of my privilege outweigh that of my shame and fear? do i really know what i'm talking about?

you worry: do i belong in this space? am i doing enough? should i be louder in my expression? should i hate myself more? is there something i should be doing? is there a wrong way to live right? what does it all mean?

and, truthfully? who knows. in this matter, in this sense, there is one question that needs to be asked: do you feel like you can be your truest self?

which is to say: do you stop and worry about how you're presenting yourself, about how you're allowed to present yourself? is there an aspect of your identity that you feel obligated to keep hidden out of fear of what others might think, or say, or do?

~~~

*this was during the women's march in january of 2017. pride was in june, & was more of a "contemplate the fact that no one, not even you, knows where you belong" kind of moment while listening to two floors of cramped club scream the lyrics to a remix of a britney spears song. more appropriate, time-wise, but less relevant overall.

Current Mood: pensive

wake up
get up—standing and proper
turn off the alarm, the faster the better
use the restroom and—for god's sake—wash your hands
remember not to look in the mirror
remember that he's dead
remember that we're not supposed to leave our homes, that you don't have work, that the only reason you're up is habit—you don't even hear the grind of the coffee maker anymore
get back in bed
pull up the covers, tell yourself it's because you're cold
scroll through twitter to make sure the sliding disaster of reality is still self-destructing on the same course as yesterday night
open a silly game to collect fruit
all the while wait to see if anyone will message you, if you're needed at all
give up sometime after nine, roll over and close your eyes again
you'll sleep and you'll regret it, these extra hours tinged with the same unease that keeps you up at night
wake up

to the king
whose deeds are dark
and low, down to
dead trees he turns, down
to the dew, to the
cradle that holds
him, he advances, alone,
and waits. the hearth
reeks of coal-dust,
and doth not comfort
with warm feeling.
sometimes he smothers
with cold, sometimes
he sleeps in his bed, and
sometimes--

(Text)

I stood with palms up, but I did't believe
You whispered, "Hey, we need to do this"
I tried so hard I could feel
All my head and my heart in one
I loved so much I almost forgot I flew
I landed, but it didn't last
I wanted so much it killed me
If we could keep that feeling
I'd almost forget I'm getting old
And I wish you were the answer
I want to believe you're the answer
And I know, we know, I know

(Text)

a fucking kitchen, for god's fucking sake, i just want a goddamn fucking kitchen

school has somehow been double-cancelled because the adults in charge of managing lots of children didn't seem to think of the fact that the majority of kids will first take the opportunity to be asshats before doing what they're supposed to

he would have laughed...so hard

phrasing things as "i think" and "i feel", as if i'm capable of clearly articulating what a sensation of general vagueness and disinterest means. is it enough to say "depression" or "grief"? is the blanket of meaning contained in those words large enough to cover...this?

bad dreams. so fucking vague a phrase, and yet. what else can i say? how to describe...ugh, i'm gonna hate how this is worded, but...

i keep dreaming in color? really vivid scenes, stories, things that make me forget i'm dreaming, that this isn't my life. people always talk about seeing people they know, of running through school, or workplaces, or whatever the fuck else and i? i don't get that.

i get terrifying semi-third person walk-throughs of serial killers stalking me, weird visions of arcane cults, uneasy scenes of things being ever...so slightly...off...

my mind is going full uncanny valley, and there's nothing i can think of to do

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where do i go

{now that i've gone too far}

Recent Entries

Dear Yuletide 2024 Author

Dear Yuletide 2022 Author

Dear Yuletide 2021 Author

Dear Yuletide 2020 Author

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