Stresseddepressedlemonzestsblog - Untitled

But did you see the way Paul Munsky ended up falling for Ellie instead of Aster?

Just right after Aster kissed him, he looked straight to Ellie’s window. At the start, all he could say about Aster was that she was smart and pretty, but if he was asked then what made him like Ellie (after everything they’ve been through together thus far) I bet he would’ve been able to list his own reasons the same way Ellie listed hers for Aster. And that scene!!! When he checked on her during the party, tucked her into his bed when she got hella drunk (which would mean he’d have to sleep on the floor maybe, idk), and he saw the letters she wrote for the food critics to give his taco sausages a chance… ah, the way he sat on that armchair maybe realizing what love really felt like for the first time. After the game where he scored, he looked for Ellie, not Aster. By the time he tried to kiss Ellie, he didn’t mind that Aster saw because his feelings had been made clear to himself. During the ending scene he looked like he had some stuff he wanted to say and couldn’t (knowing who Ellie wanted), but he still chased after her train.

And you know how he overheard Aster singing from out the music room window at first? He stopping during practice just to listen? We can actually see his affection shift to Ellie when he overheard her composing her song from out her window, and he also stopped to listen.

I know this is a gay coming-of-age movie, but part of it was also a straight dude falling in love with a lesbian. This storyline was blessed with such a soft, sincere, loving, understanding boy. All that concern? Helping Ellie’s dad prepare her college meals? Helping her pick out clothes for the seniors talent show? I’m wrecked —

I don’t appreciate any of y’all hating on him and you can fite me. Paul ended up redeeming himself from that “it’s a sin, you’re going to hell” comment just by caring enough to google about gay people so he could expand his perspective — so he could better understand Ellie. And of course there was the church scene.

Way to go, Paul Munsky.

It was a difficult day of filming because I love Brenda so much. And we sort of we started on the show together. And we sort of you know, we were there together the whole time. So filming that was not easy. And I was sort of almost afraid to watch it because I was like a bowl of snot. And most of that wasn’t acting, that was just me going (in a weepy voice) “Oh, Brenda it’s been five years!” And she’s just so elegant, and so amazing. And I’m like an Irish potato. Like, a mess everywhere. So hopefully it comes across. ~ Katie McGrath

It was interesting, because Katie [McGrath] was having a rough day, the day that we shot Brenda [Strong]’s death, but the second that they started rolling the cameras, Katie was just weeping. All these relationships are so loaded, and we’ve had such a great time building these dynamics that it was very easy to access all those feelings. ~ Jon Cryer

my dad likes to call the stretches of time where you’re not creating “dreaming periods” and says that they’re meant to allow you to absorb all of the beauty, life, and inspiration from the things around you so that when you’re able to create again, you will have fanned your spark back into a flame. sometimes its hard to see those moments as anything but stagnation, but he always says that they’re natural and healthy and needed—things that should be embraced rather than feared.

Spreading the love…fic edition

I saw a tweet from @coffeeshib looking to give some lesser-known fics some love…so here are some fics I have really enjoyed and wanted to share. If you see this I hope maybe you’ll give them a read and also post some of your own well-loved favorites.

dead mom issues by from_a_recklesswriter (@n3wkied0nth3bl0ck)

grief but also all of motley by @c-optimistic

how do you say ‘kiss me’? by catchmeimfalling

Kryptonian Lullaby by @thebluewritingbench

Let Me Count the Ways by @inkedroplets

Lost and Found by Quokkai

love me like you mean it and i know i cannot heal this hurt (but i will hold you here forever, if i can) by nostradamusO

Lover’s Gambit by PaperHatsandPaperBoats ( @paperhatintherain)

Alone Together by oversentimentalgay

echoes of a broken heart by @contagiousiridescence

Last Daughter by @douglasamongus

Mondays are the Worst by @storyiicharacter​

The corner by Sydney563 (WIP)

“I’m home.”

Kara shreds the steel door with her bare hands, brushing it away like a cobweb.

The blue of her eyes is shrouded in the dark red of tears and the raging inferno swelling inside her. Every line of her body is drawn tense and taught, ready to snap.

“Where is she?” she growls but the sound gets caught in the rumble of her chest, too low for human ears to understand. No words are necessary anyway. The sight of her is enough.

Lex’s lackeys scatter and the ones who aren’t fast enough find themselves downed and bleeding before they can blink.

In the end, Kara finds her in a back room, strapped to a table. She is pale and still, like a cadaver on a metal slab.

For the first time in three days Kara stops moving.

“Lena,” she breathes and it tastes like ice against her tongue.

-

She’s not dead.

Unconscious, dehydrated, unable to wake up, but not dead.

Kara holds onto that, the way she holds onto Lena’s hand while sitting sentry at her bedside.

Alex finds something on the back of her neck, like a microchip glowing green. When it’s passed to her, Kara looks down at it in the palm of her hand. It stings against her skin with traces of Kryptonite.

She ignores Alex’s protest and crushes it to dust.

-

When Lena opens her eyes an hour later, they are blank. She blinks once, twice, like she’s willing herself back into her body. Kara is on her feet in a flash.

“Lena? Lena, can you hear me?” is what she asks, but all she can think is please, please, please.

The sound of her voice shakes something in Lena and she’s sitting up a moment later, stiff and slow. Kara’s arms go around her shoulders, and Lena melts into her in a heartbeat.

“What happened? What’s wrong? Darling? Darling, you’re crying.”

Kara shudders out a sob.

She’s speaking Kryptonese.

-

It takes a few minutes for them to separate enough to look each other in the face. When they do, Lena gasps, trembling fingers raising to follow the curve of Kara’s cheek.

“Kara?” she asks, this time in English.

She looks like she’s seen a ghost, her face falling impossibly more ashen in the sterile med-bay lighting.

Kara presses her palm against Lena’s fingers, bringing their joined hands fully against her face.

“I’m sorry it took us so long,” Kara says quietly, and Lena’s brow furrows.

“Please, Kara,” her name sounds broken in Lena’s mouth. “Tell me what happened.”

Kara does. She tells her about her own kidnapping, about the traps Lex had set around the city, how it took them three days to find her in a bunker beneath a dark mountain.

She doesn’t tell her about the casualties. She doesn’t tell her about her own recklessness and rage.

“Three days,” Lena repeats with a shake of her head, dark hair shifting behind her like she’s sinking into darkness. “No, it. It was longer than that for me.”

“How long?”

Lena clenches her teeth together with a click and does not answer.

-

Alex examines her quickly and clinically, giving her a clean bill of health. She changes her IV with practiced hands.

It takes both of them to convince Kara to go take a shower and grab some food. Neither expect her to be gone for long.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Alex asks quietly, keeping her focus on the IV in a small act of mercy.

Lena draws a deep breath, fingers twisting against the scratchy med-bay sheets. She hasn’t said a word since Kara left, just stared into the middle distance lost in thought.

“Lex,” she says after a moment, his name falling heavily through the air. “He sent me somewhere, another reality perhaps or...”

“Or a simulation, maybe?” Alex offers. “Like Obsidian tech?”

Lena’s fingers curl into fists, and she turns her head away from Alex as if to hide tears.

“It was real,” she says harshly. “To me, it was so real.”

-

Kara is back in three minutes, hair damp and mouth stuffed with half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She sets the other half in front of Lena, who stares at it.

“You should eat something,” Kara urges. When Lena looks up at her there is so much intensity in her eyes that Kara stops chewing.

“Is this real?” she asks, voice so small even Kara struggles to hear it over the sound of her heart cracking in half. She swallows her bite past the lump in her throat, and places her left hand over Lena’s on the bed.

“It’s real. You’re real and I’m real.”

Lena stares at their joined hands for a long time, eyes roaming like she’s looking for an answer.

-

After Lena chokes down three bites of sandwich and an unspoken number of sobs, she falls into a deep sleep. Kara sits at her bedside and does not look away from her face.

Behind her Alex stands stone faced, arms crossed over her chest. For a long time the only sound in the room is Lena’s steady breathing.

“What are you thinking?” Alex asks, warning flashing through her tone like an alarm bell. Kara watches Lena’s eyelashes flutter, and straightens her spine.

“I’m going to kill Lex Luthor.”

-

It’s Kelly who gets Lena to open up.

She takes the chair that Kara reluctantly vacates and asks her to give them some privacy. It’s a long time before Kara huffs out a sigh and relents.

“I’ll be in the lab,” she tells Lena, waiting for her nod of understanding before disappearing through the door. It clicks closed quietly behind her.

Kelly sits patiently beside the bed, hands folded in her lap. She doesn’t look at Lena for long, instead taking in the blinking lights and medical equipment around them.

“This isn’t a very restful space, is it?” she asks after a moment. “Would you like someone to take you home?”

Lena breathes out harshly and licks her lips.

“There’s no going home anymore,” she says.

Kelly looks at her then, taking in the hollow of her eyes and the resigned frown on her lips.

“Lena,” she starts gently. “The place that you were sent to...did you have a life there? People you cared about?”

Green eyes turn to stare at the closed door Kara just exited through and she swallows thickly, jaw working in a tense grind.

“Yes.”

-

When Kelly returns to the tower common room it’s to find the Danvers sisters locked in a tense argument.

“—you can’t. Look what he did to Lena, Kara. We don’t know what he’s capable of. It’s too dangerous.”

“Exactly,” Kara snaps, gesturing wildly toward the med-bay. “Look what he did to Lena! He needs to pay! Who knows what kind of torture he inflicted on her in that place? How much she’s suffered?”

They stare each other down for a tense beat.

“I think she was happy,” Kelly says quietly after a moment, and two heads snap to look at her. “Wherever he sent her, whatever kind of life she had there. I think she was happy.”

Alex barely catches Kara when her knees give out, both of them toppling beneath her weight.

-

Kara spots Lex’s helicopter just as it’s leaving the bunker. She grips the rotating blades in her hands and squeezes until they crinkle like confetti.

She looks down through the window and locks eyes with Lex, who appears equal parts smug and afraid.

Kara snarls at him, spins once through the air and hurls the whole helicopter into the side of the mountain. When the inferno of twisted metal and rock finally hits the ground below she makes sure to check the wreckage.

He’s alive. Barely.

Kara cradles his broken body as she flies them back to the tower, and tries to let her fury die in the wreckage instead.

-

They move Lena from the tower before Kara arrives with Lex. She lets Kelly wrap her in an oversize sweater and guide her into the front seat of Nia’s car.

When they ask her where she wants to go she doesn’t have an answer. They end up at Kara’s loft.

“Is this okay?” Kelly asks after she’s settled Lena on the couch beneath Kara’s red throw blanket.

Lena nods, and she asks Kelly to stay. Nia turns the lights down low and kisses Lena’s forehead before leaving them alone. They sit in silence for a while, both exhausted from the events of the past few days.

“Kara said you spoke Kryptonese,” Kelly says quietly, breaking the silence. Lena stills for a moment and then nods, saying something softly that Kelly can’t understand.

“Did she teach you?”

“A version of her did.”

Kelly lobs the next question with enough grace that Lena doesn’t flinch.

“Did you love her?”

Lena looks down at the blanket over her lap and runs her hands over it, feeling the familiar material beneath her palms.

“I still do.”

“That Kara or this one?”

It’s a long time before Lena answers.

-

When Kara gets home, after double and triple checking that Lex couldn’t possibly escape the containment force fields they’ve rigged, Kelly and Lena are both asleep.

They’re curled together beneath her blanket, Lena’s head on Kelly’s shoulder with Kelly’s arm snug around her shoulders. Kara takes out her phone and snaps a picture before waking them.

Kelly excuses herself with a meaningful look that Kara doesn’t understand. When she turns her attention back to Lena, she’s looking up at her with an equally indecipherable expression.

“Will you take me to bed?” Lena asks, and a second later she’s cradled against Kara’s chest. She curls into that same position once they’re both tucked beneath the comforter.

Kara wraps her arms around her and holds on for dear life. The sun sets out the window and the light shifts from yellow to red to complete darkness. They lay snugly in each other’s arms, both feeling their first bit of true comfort since Lena first went missing.

Just as Kara is starting to drift off to sleep Lena speaks.

“I had a life there. It was, it was a lot longer than three days. It was years. It was a whole life. I had friends, a job... a wife,” she whispers into the darkness. Kara’s heart stutters in her chest, and Lena’s close enough that they both feel it.

“Do you miss her?”

“Yes.”

Kara sucks in a deep breath and let’s it out slowly, Lena’s hand that’s pressed against her chest rising and falling with the motion. After a moment Kara finds the courage to ask the question she really wants to ask.

“Did you miss me?”

Lena picks her head up just enough to look into her eyes, barely able to make out bright blue in the darkness. Her hand slides from Kara’s chest up her neck to cradle the edge of her jaw, thumb brushing the soft skin there tenderly.

“I didn’t need to.”

the parallels

I see a lot of people who tell young people–especially young people who are heading into college–that they should “do what they love.” And they’re right. You should do what you love.

But there’s a world of difference between doing what you love for you, and doing what you love for a paycheck. 

I went to undergrad for graphic design and 3-D design–art and more art, I usually say–and I loved it. You know what I didn’t love? Trying to collect my fees from clients. Trying to meet unrealistic, over-simplified or over-specific briefs from people who didn’t know what they were talking about. Coming home, having worked creatively all day, with no creative juice left for the things I wanted to do.

You know what I would tell you instead? Do something that you can be interested in, with people you like.

You don’t have to love it. Loving your work can be a lot, and it often means you have to live in your job 24/7. Some people can do that. Not everyone can, or should.  But if you can find work that’s interesting enough that it doesn’t feel tedious, and people you can enjoy spending your 9-5 with, and you can make money, that’s great! It means you can do the things you love for you.

I’m in law school now. It’s interesting work, and difficult, and I like doing it. I like how complicated it gets, and I like the stories it tells. But I don’t come home and read law journals for fun. I come home, and I sculpt, and I draw, and I paint, and I read. I do these things for me.

And I love it. 

I probably enjoyed this "quick sketch" a little too much.

I just want to say that it has been an honor and a privilege to have had this generation be the generation of USWNT players that “raised” me. ❤️