29|She/They|Bi/Pan| Home to the craziness not contained by my brain. Art historian, artist, performer, perfectionist and occasionally crazy loon. Obsessed with musicals, vintage clothing and steampunk in all its incarnations. Find me at: www.threenerdychicks.wordpress.com
My spouse and I were talking last night and the jeans problem came up so I want to talk about it with tumblr here.
The jeans problem was the favorite lecture one of my philosophy professors in college gave about the history of jeans and how it ties into capitalism/mainstream culture absorbing and monetizing any counterculture it encounters. So prior to the 1950s jeans were mostly an item of work-wear that you wore on the job as a farmer or factory worker or miner because they were cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. If you were off the job you'd wear what we'd call now dress pants or slacks. This changes in the 1950s when youth culture start wearing jeans as regular clothing, again because they're cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. But then jeans get absorbed by the culture and we start getting designer jeans, acid-washed jeans, pre-ripped jeans, and now we got people shelling out hundreds of dollars for "povertycore" aesthetic. And now jeans aren't even cheap, durable, and hard-wearing.
This came up because my spouse was talking about thrifting and spooky things (two of her favorite things) and how there was this trend of buying a landscape painting from a thrift store which was probably going to end up in a garbage dump and painting a sheet ghost on it to make it art millennials would like. But now you can go to Michael's or Home Goods or wherever and just buy a landscape painting with a sheet ghost on it, mass-manufactured by a corporation. The counter-culture once again being monetized and absorbed by the culture. It's the jeans problem again.
this painting by andrew wyeth has got SO many ghosts in it. most andrew wyeth paintings have ghosts in, but this is off the scale!
this painting by dragan bibin has only one ghost as far as i can tell, but it's a really scary ghost (the dog thinks so too)
this painting by meraud guevara looks very peaceful, but unfortunately it has a ghost in it. i can't tell you where, but it does
you might think you can see the ghosts in this dorothea tanning painting, but you're wrong. the little girls are just ordinary girls. the actual ghost is behind one of those doors.
it was an entire radio show built around perpetuating a very simple joke, but it was uniquely powerful in its capacity to prompt the reaction I was looking for.
so my slot was at the tail end of rush hour, and i got a fair number of listeners/callers who were on the way home from the office. And like, I had a lot of callers, who almost all wanted to request songs that really didn’t fit with the aesthetic. I had pitched a power pop show when i got my slot, but the callers were not having it; they invariably wanted classic rock.
this made sense in a way. if you think about the demographics of the people who listened to the radio for music in 2010 instead of their ipods or cds or whatever, you’d expect them to skew older right? accordingly, i quickly realized that almost all of the people who called to request songs were Dads of a Certain Age. It was honestly annoying at first - I’m all for most classic rock, but that wasn’t what the show was supposed to be.
And so one day, when i was feeling particularly annoyed with requests that just didn’t fit thematically, i came up with the joke that rapidly became the only reason I kept the show going. Per station rules, I had to play a certain number of pre-recorded PSAs during my show, and before I cut to one I was supposed to read out the song titles and artists for all the music i had played before the break. So this one day when i had to inform the world before the break that the song they just heard was, per a listener’s request, Hey Jude by the Beatles, I decided to do a goof. I said:
“and finally, that last song you heard was Hey Jude, which was of course written and performed by the Rolling Stones.”
I barely had time to get the ads going before the phone started ringing. See, I had been assuming people would realize i was making an obvious joke by claiming one of the most well-known Beatles tracks was a Stones song, but i had failed to consider that my listeners were mostly 55-70 year old dads who were irritated from a long day in the office.
And when those dads heard me, a millennial woman, get the artist of an extremely well-known beatles song WRONG???!
they HAD to call in to correct my ignorance. never in a polite way either, it was condescending and annoyed or nothing. and like, they were just SO personally insulted by my inaccurate reporting that it took a massive amount of effort for me to avoid cracking up during the call. I had never understood why some people would enjoy trolling random strangers on the internet before, but in that moment, I understood the appeal entirely.
obviously i did it again right before the next commercial break, immediately after playing Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen David Bowie.
the phone immediately began to ring.
“ARE YOU AN IDIOT?” one of the callers began, “DAVID BOWIE???? THAT WAS QUEEN!”
“I thought David Bowie was the lead singer of Queen though?” I replied with as much innocent earnestness as i could conjure.
I could hear an intake of breath as the infuriated boomer on the other end of the line struggled to figure out where to even start.
@eduards-stuff I kept doing the same joke for an hour a week for an entire year, and the dads NEVER caught on. After episode 1 of the new format I started taking the angry dad calls on air, which added another layer of hilarity to the whole concept.
My friends on campus knew that hay I was doing and enjoyed tuning in, but only one actual listener ever figured out what I was doing, and he was literally a random 30 year old guy from the netherlands with access to an early internet connection radio service. He was possibly my only actual fan. I only know about him because he went to the effort of making a skype and paying for international service so he could call in, and while I got a few calls from him, the first remains my favorite:
me: hi there, you’ve got TST-
him: *strained, wheezing dutch laughter*
me: hey, is everything o-
him: pfffHAHAHAAH YOU MAKE THEM SO MAD. THEY THINK SO LITTLE OF YOUUUUUUUU BUT THE MEN ARE THE ONES WHO ARE FOOLISH! HA! HA! HA! YOU HAVE DUPED THEM!
me: sir i do not know you and i have never even seen you but i am in romantic love with you.
thinking about the time a former housemate said to me "hey I put these box fans in the living room because it's hot" while gesturing to the fans that I was actively sitting in front of because it was hot. and I said "okay thanks." and she kept standing there like she was waiting for something else so I said "am I blocking the airflow? do you need me to move?" and she said no I'm just letting you know they're here, in the living room, for circulation. and I said well yes, I did put that together. I am enjoying them. thank you. and she looked confused. so I asked "am I meant to do something with this information or are you just informing me?" and she said no I'm letting you know they're here because It's Hot In Here. she seemed a bit aggravated, and her emphasis seemed deliberate.
it took me asking three more times before she finally told me she wanted me to leave the fans where they are instead of moving them to my room or something. and I said oh! I had no intention of doing so but thank you for letting me know what the expectation is.
about a month later she brought up that conversation as the moment it actually clicked for her that I Am Autistic And Will Not Magically Intuit The Unspoken Request You Didn't Ask Me.
I have observed enough allistic communication to know that generally, if somebody points something out to you that you can already see or are already clearly interacting with, they are making an indirect request. but as I don't know what the request is, the only way forward is for me to guess (and likely get it wrong), or prompt the allistic to tell me clearly what they need.
however, allistics don't realize they do this, so asking them to say the unspoken surprises and confuses them. this is not their fault. allistics can be quite emotionally fragile and perceive directness as confrontation, so they habitually rely on indirect speech and coded language to preserve others' feelings. this is why they may find it difficult to be direct, even when asked. I have found that with enough gentle encouragement and reassurance that they are actually helping you, you too can achieve successful communication with your allistic friend or loved one. :)
waaaay back when I was a cashier in retail we would talk about dumb shit while unloading the truck, and we got to the "what would you do in a zombie apocalypse" me and another worker were like yeah we would just die. End it all, we can't fight or run or shit. I refuse to put that much effort into survival.
And my manager was like no!!!! If that happened, I would drive to find you guys in my truck and we could eat stuff from my wife's garden and I would make sure everyone I know survived!! I would carry you all on my shoulders away from the zombies!!
Anyway, random shout out to that guy. You were too kind for retail management, Devin.
also afterwards everyone who was talking about their cool bunker fantasies were like "Damn, Devin's right, we should also be considering helping people around us." which is the only recorded instance of a retail shift making people better human beings.
Fever Dreams (Vampire!Cooper Flagg) part 4: Neurodivergent Floor Time
AO3 link!
NBA Vampire AU Worldbuilding Masterlist!
Part 3!
Darling wakes up after being chomped, and Cooper has a panic attack. (2229 words)
Vampire!Cooper Flagg, Fluff, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Chronic Illness, vampire bites, blood drinking, caretaker!reader, playful banter, Cooper is a little shit, sassy reader, sassy Cooper, unreliable narrator, Cooper has a panic attack, friends to lovers, slow burn
Writing time: 10 hours, 2 minutes
Darling's Perspective
I don’t know when we got this close to each other, but at some point we crossed the line of friends into this blurred space that vampire tamers are supposed to avoid.
And it’s just like the world to throw problems at me that I’m woefully under-prepared for. Like, I studied my ass off in school. I learned all about vampire transitions in just about every bloodline that had any information on it. I learned all the quirks, the oddities, I have a particular fascination with fringe cases. It’s why Cooper appealed to me so much. He’s an American bloodline—as pure American as American can get—going vampire at 19 fucking years old. I have old colleagues reaching out to me for information on him so they can add shit to the ever-growing knowledge bank for us guides, and I have to be so fucking careful about any way I write up his case for medical literature because it’d be so damned obvious to anyone in the correct circles to know it’s him I’m talking about.
But nothing could’ve prepared me for falling ass-over-tea-kettle in fucking love with him.
Nothing.
Cooper had been—honestly?—a gem. For a baby vampire. In the grand scheme of 19-year-olds, he’s a well-meaning shithead, but all 19-year-old boys are shitheads. Clouds are found in the sky, who knew? He had one of the roughest transitions I’ve known in terms of just feeling sick all the time and being functionally disabled about half the time, but he still managed to not become a woe is me story or blanket his misery onto other people. He’s genuinely pleasant to be around, he follows instructions weirdly well, he’ll cut the attitude the moment I tell him to (but I do let him get away with too much. I like him. Sue me.), he asks intelligent questions and actually makes sure he understands the answers. Somehow, he had the bandwidth to be fighting for consciousness through back-to-back fevers and fatigue severe enough that he could barely get out of bed while also arranging for a birthday cake and a new laptop to be delivered to the house for me. I asked him what possibly possessed him, and he just shrugged. Said he felt like returning the favor for babysitting him. Since when are shithead 19-year-olds sweet?
And he’s so calm. Baby vampires are supposed to be like hangry five-year-olds, all big, sweeping, intense emotions crumpled up into a newspaper-ball of hunger, discomfort, pain, disorientation, and heightened senses. But Coop’s not that much different from his pre-vampire self. His level of composure was summated as inhuman before he ever went vampire—and, admittedly, I did roll my eyes at that because I was so sure he’d be a dumpster fire whenever he did go vamp—but, no. I’ll eat my thoughts. He’s got some fucking preternatural Zen about him. Sure, he’s a little snappy and witty and pouty when he’s feeling like dogshit, but like, 90% of the idiots I knew in high school had week-long tantrums if their bestie didn’t like their Insta post or some garbage. He’s pretty tolerable as long as he has something to do. And he’s pretty good at finding something to do.
At floor level, I-can’t-function-enough-to-sit-up-even level, we’ll just talk. For hours. About kind of anything. He’s actually way smarter than he looks—and he already seemed like the Jock Who Did His Homework, you know what I mean? Like no, I didn’t get the impression that he lived buried behind textbooks, but I guess I didn’t realize how much he already knew and how curious he still was. Which is really my dumbass fault. Because he’s been lowkey grilling me on the ins and outs of going vampire this entire time.
He doesn’t look like the type who could go on whole-ass ramble about theoretical math, but, apparently, he just idle-modes Mandelbrot sets like it’s a normal thing to be doing. He tried explaining it. I got lost in the first minute, but he seemed so into it that I just let him cook. We played chess together when he couldn’t take lights well enough to kick my ass at 2K. He was pretty shit at it, but he’s getting better. I got him into stand-up comedy, and sometimes we’d just blob on the couch having giggle-fits at Josh Johnson delivering a deadpanned very real, very funny assessment of the state of the world (because, seriously, how do you lose an entire giraffe?). Cooper’s honestly a transition guide’s best-case scenario.
Maybe that’s when we got too close. Hard to tell.
My eyes flew open to a lightning flash across window blinds.
I didn’t know where Cooper was.
That was my first thought. I don’t know where he is, I don’t know if he’s in pain, I don’t know if he’s got a fever, has he eaten, fuck my life—he’s not throwing up again, is he?
It wasn’t until I flailed upright that I felt pain. Dull ache, side of the neck, like I fell asleep funny. My foot caught the comforter and sent me off-balance, but before I stumbled, something clamped around me. The scent of coconut, lavender, orange, something deep and earthy that I couldn’t place, and the musk of warm skin—you know the scent—exploded around me. My cheek pressed into something both soft and stiff, but hot as a heating pad. My fists clutched some kind of thin fabric. His t-shirt. That’s his t-shirt.
“Easy.” Cooper? That’s Cooper’s voice rumbling through his chest and against my face. “Don’t fall.”
“Jesus—are you okay?” I wriggled out of his grasp enough to see him, but it was nearly pitch-black in the room, so I just barely picked up his silhouette. His hands stayed on my arms, holding me in place. I keep forgetting how huge his hands are. It’s like he had the entire span between my shoulders and elbows in his grip.
“I should be asking you that.” His voice was flat. Mechanical. Has he always had a lisp?
“Did-did you eat dinner? Do you have a fever?” I felt around in the dark and pressed the back of my hand to his neck. He felt fine. Maybe a little clammy. “How’s your pain?”
“Darling—”
“Did you take your meds? You can’t miss them, you’ll have a bad flare—”
“You don’t remember, do you?”
I froze at that. “Don’t remember what, Cooper?” Wait, hold on a second. “Why… are you in my room?”
“I-I bit you?” he whispered.
My hand flew to the achy side of my neck, poked a large, square adhesive bandage. Bits of the evening came back. We were talking on the couch. He doesn’t check the weather enough for being in Dallas for the summer, how do you not know about Tornado Alley? I made my way to the kitchen to grab him an orange. Jesus Christ, Cooper, don’t sneak up on me like that!
“Cooper? Hey, easy! Don’t grab me so hard; I’m not going anywhere.”
His eyes were vacant. Vacuous. Endless pits of black pupils around slivers of blue iris, but he released his grip.
“Here.” I held an orange up for him to bite. He turned his nose up at it. “I know, sweetheart, but it’ll help.”
He bit into it, but his attention stayed locked on me. Pupils still blown out. My stomach fell through the floor. He removed his teeth, brushed the orange out of my hand. Swiped the corner of his mouth.
“I’m-I’m sorry. I-I didn’t mean to.”
“No, no, it’s okay,” I said, patting his chest. It was most definitely not okay, but something stung in my heart to hear his voice so broken. “I’m okay.”
He raked a hand through his hair. Lightning flashed one, two, three, four times. He wasn’t looking at me. And he was trembling. Badly.
“Hey, you’re okay.” I don’t know what possessed me to pull him into a hug, but he heaved out a breath and clamped his arms around me. “Ow, my back.”
He lifted me onto the counter like I didn’t weigh anything. I mean, I know he was strong before the vampirism and the vampirism amplified that even more, but it’s jarring to get moved like you don’t exist. He pushed my knees apart and fit his waist between my thighs. It was a bit of a crime that he didn’t know what he was doing. Of course, the universe would do this to me.
“Is this better?” His speech was slurred worse than Monica’s when she’s drunk drunk. And his breath was hot against the shell of my ear.
I pushed against his chest. “Cooper, you don’t know how to do this safely.”
“Please, Darling, just a little?” he whined it into the crook of my neck. “I just want a taste.”
“Cooper…”
He sucked a wet kiss over my pulse. Dragged his lips over the spot. “Please? Fuck, I can almost taste you already…”
I squeaked when he nuzzled his face into the crook of my neck. “Cooper!”
“I-I won’t bite again. I won’t. I-I promise…” Fuck me, he sounded like he was on the verge of tears. “I’m just… fuck, I’m sorry…”
I rubbed his back, trying to soothe him. “Disoriented?”
He shook his head.
I took a chance. “Scared?”
He nodded into my shoulder. Hot wetness hit my collarbone.
“Don’t cry sweetheart.” Don’t look at me like that. It’s just what came out of my mouth. “You’re okay.”
“I’m fucking terrified,” he breathed.
“Shhhh, you’re okay,” I whispered. It’s all I could manage through the shock of it. It’s funny how little his bite hurts. It’s supposed to be like a bee sting or some shit like that, but it just felt like a particularly annoying injection to the neck. And he was being gentle. It’s not uncommon for baby vampires to bite way too hard, tear up your skin, suck so hard that you have giant purple marks for weeks. No, he was gentle. Took little kitten licks, just lapping up whatever blood he could easily get.
“I-I remember doing it,” he mumbled, muffled in my hoodie. “I remember you telling me to stop. And I—” he gasped again. Almost choked on air. His shaking got worse.
Before I could ask him if he was okay (he wasn’t; the fuck was I thinking?), he sank to the floor.
Not a lot scares me. I’m pretty resistant to a lot of horrors—kind of have to be to be in this line of work. Vampires aren’t monsters, there aren’t creatures in the dark, ghosts aren’t real, there are no curses and shit like that. I could just as easily die in a car accident on my way to the grocery store as I could get shot in said grocery store or shredded apart by a random vampire like I’m a gory piñata—there’s no sense in walking around this Earth terrified of any of those possibilities, especially at the expense of caring for and about the people I love. Anything could happen to me. Oh well. Can’t do jack shit about it.
But the idea of Cooper having a panic attack scared me.
Maybe that’s when the line truly blurred. When he stopped being my charge, my responsibility, this kid that I’m tugging along the path of vampirism, kicking and swearing and screaming, and he became someone in that circle of people I love. Because anything could happen to me, sure, but something happening to my loved ones keeps me up at night. Something happening to Cooper keeps me up at night.
I fumbled for the stupid little switch on the nightstand lamp and flipped it on. He was on the floor next to the bed, hugging his knees to his chest, had his forehead on them, was heaving slow, shaking breaths. I don’t know what hurt worse: Seeing that he was freaking the fuck out, or seeing that he’d clearly had this happen enough times to know how to self-regulate said freak-out. Jesus Christ, how many panic attacks does a kid have to go through to be able to breathe right through one as a barely-adult? And why didn’t anyone tell me about this? Does Kelly even know this about her kid?
I’ll admit that I had no idea what to do. Like I know how to get panicking people to calm down, but what am I supposed to do when someone’s calming themselves down? Loiter around? Leave them alone?
I decided to join him on the floor. A little neurodivergent floor time, I guess.
We sat in silence for a while with nothing but an occasional flash of lightning and thunder rumbles to keep us company. It didn’t take him that long to return back to his baseline state, another thing that made me think too hard about how often he’s had to exorcise panic from his being. At some point, I noticed him staring at my hand.
I extended it. More out of curiosity than anything else.
He intertwined his fingers with mine, rested his chin on his forehead, and closed his eyes.
That’s when it happened, when I fell in love with him. If not any point before then, definitely by then. Because every fiber in my body wanted to crawl into his lap.
Thank you for reading! Please read my pinned post before submitting requests!
Cooper fragrance notes from Old Spice, Fiji (which he notes as something he uses in his GQ interview)
fuck it I will make this my Disability Pride Month Request: if you are able-bodied, or just unfamiliar, look up the prices of things. Look up what life-sustaining medication costs, look up what good manual¹ and any power wheelchairs cost, look up what corrective surgery and accessible vehicles and home meal delivery services and service dog training and special dietary restriction food costs. and look up how much money is available for people who can't work.
how many months of government support does it take to afford something like a power wheelchair if you're someone who needs one to get out of bed? how much expense is incurred while saving up for that, making sure you still get food, cleaning, other appointments while you're saving up? is it enough to pay rent? is it enough to still have nice meals, streaming subscriptions, a new video game? is it enough to help family or friends cover emergencies? are there resources available to help with dating, girl's nights, family events if you can't do it all yourself? how in demand are those services, how far in advance do they have to be reserved, how much do they cost?
I've had a few posts about disability get relatively well-shared at this point, and there's always an element of surprise in it - like, what do you mean there's subscriptions, what do you mean it's that expensive, isn't there something else? - and while I understand why, it would really mean a lot if people who don't know about this stuff took the initiative to find out just how bad some of this shit is on their own time
¹ and not just the folding ones on Amazon, which are still expensive, but which I can say from experience are also really uncomfortable and not suited for full time use
every year small towns and indigenous communities across canada are burnt to nothing by horrific wildfires and americans go on the internet to complain about it and blame us bc the smoke has spread to their state. i’m so tired.
go yell at mark carney or your own local politicians about climate change and urge them to do more to stop it. the namaygoosisagagun first nation had their community destroyed today. you can find a link to donate to them here. donate to your local food bank. go to the beach next week when the smoke clears and you don’t have to think about it anymore while the people who’s lives have been destroyed will have to pick up the pieces and try to move forward when we are already in a huge cost of living crisis across the country.
rbing with other places you can donate to to support those impacted by the fires!
true north aid (an organization aimed at providing support to remote/northern indigenous people in canada)
canadian red cross wildfire fund
ontario spca and humane society (links to their donate page specifically aimed at supporting pets and animals in areas impacted by the fires)
and the anishinabek nation’s page where you can donate to support the namaygoosisagagun nation who had their land destroyed by the fires is still accepting donations
i like when a video game does all its plot progression via boss battles so "she tried to kill me and it didnt work and now we're friends" is basically the story of every one of of the protagonists friendships.
