#152 words

[rarebloorose]

hello i come bearing prompts, your fluff highness. o7 first one: ring

The fluff has arrived! 👑

“So what do you think?” Roy asked as his fiance laid against his chest, reading a book.

“Hm? About what?” Ed didn't look up from his nightly reading.

“What our last names should be. Everything else for the wedding is settled except for that.”

“What's wrong with keeping things as they are?”

“Darling, please take this seriously. I want to show the world who I'm spending my life with.”

“We're already getting married. I don't understand what the big deal is.” Ed closed his book and gave Roy his full attention. “Don't pout!”

“Then choose something!”

“Fine! Why don't I just hyphenate my name onto yours? Does that work?”

Roy played around with the name before saying it out loud. “Edward Mustang-Elric… Roy Mustang-Elric…it has a nice ring to it.” Roy pulled Ed closer.

“It's *long.*” Ed said with no bite in his voice before leaning up and kissing his fiance’s cheek.

[authorangelita]

Almost everything I wrote today is spoilery, so sorry for the generic line :)

Mac looked peaceful for the first time in days, and Matty couldn't bring herself to wake him.

[intimacy-in-virtuality]

“I haven't seen her in months, yet these little glimpses of the world through her eyes felt like I was with her for a second”.

Post 1

Using Instagram allowed me to maintain connections without the pressure of constant texting/messaging, fostering an odd sense of intimacy. Despite not conversing for weeks due to a friend moving abroad, I checked the app multiple times a day for her updates. I felt like I could see into her head with each post. Images are not just representations of the world but part of it – ‘inextricably linked’ with reality (Sontag, 1977:6) – highlighting why snippets of her perception seemed to communicate so much about her psyche; more than than some conversations. Paradoxically, I felt closer to her even without speaking – a “distant closeness” (Van House, 2007:102). Rather than being distancing/objectifying, I experienced SM’s visual nature as bonding/intimate (Ingold, 2011:315), enabling our connection to evolve when it may otherwise stagnate.

[stareandwrite]

There were the obvious, and obliging, exhibitionists—the spangle-clad drag queens, the tattooed gym rats with their oiled chests, the Russian beanpoles in their dental-floss bikinis and stacked heels, trailing stout, balding father figures in their wake. The usual addled tourist families came streaming by, loaded down with Aldo and Sephora shopping bags. I decided to settle in. Next came an Orthodox couple—he in a black frock coat and beaver fur hat, she in a glossy wig, neither of them, amazingly enough, sweating in the bright heat. Then a stooped man in a shirt and tie, carrying a thick book, “The Psychology of Shame.” Three pretty young women who were, all three of them, talking on their cell phones—I hope not to each other. A dreadlocked street person, pushing a groaning shopping cart. People speaking Italian, French, Spanish; arguing, laughing, sulking. I could have easily stayed all day.

- Susan Orlean on people-watching in Miami Beach last weekend

Susan's words inspired me to start this "Stare and Write" Tumblr just a few minutes ago. (Note: If this blog never amounts to anything more than this one post, it will seem silly to have written anything about what inspired it. I'm OK with that. But I'd be more OK with you submitting something great to get things rolling.)