a Christmas runaway bride story

For those of you surrounded by people celebrating Christmas this winter, who have estranged relationships to family, and who can relate to feeling trapped in an unhappy romantic relationship… I recommend the short story Bride by Christina Deka.

I judge a lot of things by their first sentence, and the first sentence of this thing is “I am not a bad person,” so, you know, there’s a first sentence for you.

In conclusion, here’s an excerpt to show what made me think of sharing this story with y’all:

I wanted to say, “I do not love you,” but I couldn’t. Gary was a good man, and good men were hard to come by. I knew this. I had been with all the bad ones. So I just smiled and said I was okay.

On abused consent

Hey guess what I’ve been thinking about again also.  Did you guess CSA rhetoric?  Because the answer is CSA rhetoric.

dangit dangit dangit

Bad things about spending the night of Christmas Eve entirely alone: listening to a dramatic podcast and getting all worked up about your favorite scumbag character almost dying and then turns out he’s aliiiiiive he’s aliiiiiive but then even more bad things happen and there aren’t any episodes after that and you’re left all emotionally hecked up about it with no one around to have a live conversation about it arghhhhh.  Normally I could at least text someone but it’s Christmas Eve!  Christmas freaking Eve!  People are all doing their Christmas Eve things with their Christmas Eve people and don’t have time to be checking their phones and crap.

(he’s alive he’s alive he’s alive but now he’s in deep water and why’d you have to do that man arghhh)

Rowan is gray

This has probably been posted elsewhere, but it’s going here too.

Peridot’s reverence

(spoilers for “It Could Have Been Great” and “Message Received”)

AA: “Just Mad ‘Cause You’re Single”

[major spoilers for Steven Universe ahead!]

Anonymous wrote in:

Moses talk

Every time I see that gifset with the “real talk, you don’t even have to be religious to appreciate The Prince of Egypt” comment appended to it, I get irritated, and I don’t know why.

It just seems like… a non sequitur to me.  The Prince of Egypt is a work of art.  And I don’t just mean that in the colloquial use of “is a work of art” to mean “is a great thing” (although, no doubt, that movie has a special place in my heart).  I mean it’s literally a work of art.  It’s a film.  It’s a piece of entertainment created for the purpose of entertainment.  It’s not a “religious” movie for having canon monotheism any more than Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a religious TV show for having canon witchcraft.

And yeah, Buffy isn’t a realistic portrayal of Wicca, but the way The Prince of Egypt tells the story of Exodus doesn’t stick close to the book, either.  I can name a couple major discrepancies off the top of my head, and I’m not even someone who reads the Bible regularly.  And for all that the movie features an Abrahamic prophecy and portrays God as a speaking character, it’s not advocating the worship of God or even about the worship of God — the English lyrics in the song “When You Believe” have more to with self-congratulatory celebration and ambiguous “belief” than they do actual thanksgiving to God.  I like that song and all, but lyrics like “who knows what miracles you can achieve” really grate on my nerves.  It’s not a worship song.  It’s an ode to the law of attraction.

And.  Again.  I like this movie.  I’m just really confused why anyone would think you have to be “religious” (Jewish? Christian? Either?) to appreciate it.  And even if it were an overtly religious work of art…  Um, hello?  The Sistine Chapel?  The Last Supper?

I mean.  Come on.  Not all of the stuff connected to us is as bad as Christian rock.

cn: sympathy for abusers & sexual coercion mention

Sometimes I can lead people to believe that I’m actually kind of clever.  I can even convince myself of that, most of the time.  But sometimes, I do things to myself that are really, really… foolish.