I don't even know...
So I was in Walmart the other day and I found myself thinking, wow, Walmart has a lot of variety. Like, a whole lot. I was in the international food section, which is really split between an Asian section, which is further split into soy sauce, Pocky, and just-add-water crap, and a Latino section, which is what made me pause and go, there's some good shit at Walmart. Now, the reason I was in the international section in the first place is that every once in a while I get sick of English and decide I need to immerse myself in something else. So, yes, Walmart is where I go. God, I'm weird sometimes.
I'm starting to wonder if I can do anything normally. It helps that my family is fucked up. We had a discussion at work the other day about family appreciation because one of the girls was hyberpolizing about her fourteen-year-old daughter and all the languages she can supposedly speak (I'm sorry, three years of high school Spanish is not the same as speaking a language). Now, besides the fact that I got inordinately jealous of this child for having learned Thai and Tagalog from her maternal and paternal grandmothers respectively, I was shocked enough to say that I wished my mother would talk about me like that.
This is not because my mother has no reason to be proud of me because I'm a fuckup and whatnot but because, as I told my coworkers, my mother feels no qualms about laughing at my nine-year-old brother's drawings because he added bellybuttons to stick figures.
Now, see, I'm not sure whether I'm an awful person or if I've been so brainwashed by this way of thinking that I not only don't find this morally wrong but funny. Bellybuttons. On stick figures. Why did that even occur to him? But, yeah, apparently this makes my mother a horrible person. There's something horribly offensive in having people who have never met your parents tell you that the way they raised you is fucked up. It's that stereotypical, only I can beat on her, you're not allowed to thing.
Also, I'm finding that even when I write notes for stories (and I'm totally 1/3 of the way through a new SVU fic. It's set four years and nine months before the current storyline and it's before Linke and Juri get together), I freak out when my sloppy ass handwriting makes it look like I'm misspelling words (which I ostensibly am not. I do not misspell words, not in English or any other language. I mistype and I memorize words wrong but I do not misspell. I do not think of a word and have to guess how to spell it. I memorize words the first time I see them.). My handwriting is a cross between cursive chickenscratch and shitty shorthand, where sometimes I'm positive you could read it clearly from across the room and other times I wonder if it's really Arabic. Then I try reading it backwards and sometimes it's actually recognizable. But, regardless, I end up going back and adding superscript h's and i's. It's always h's and i's, too. I dunno why.
So here's a rough preview of the new fic. Juri has been working for the SVU for three months, is partnered with Linke, and has been dating Jan almost as long:
The victim in the back of the delivery van lay like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Her legs were spread, blood and bloody tissue pooled between them. Juri’s nostrils flared as he forced his stomach back down. She had a long cut from just under her ribcage to her pelvis, blood matting the coarse curls there.
“The infant’s missing. It looks like she gave birth before she died.”
“So they took the baby and cut her open?”
Jan nodded.
“Call the NARC squad in,” Juri said, crouching beside the body.
“Why?” Linke asked.
“See that cut?” Juri pointed to the woman’s mutilated abdomen. “That’s how dealers get mules that don’t cooperate. If they try to run, the dealers find them and extract the goods. It can get messy,” he added at the look one of the officers gave him.
“Messy,” the man repeated.
“What is that?” Juri asked, pointing at the bloody mass on the floor. He felt queasy. He’d thought he’d gotten used to this.
Linke grinned unpleasantly. “That, my friend, is a placenta.”
ØØØ
Three months ago, the department captain of the SVU had stepped down and Timo Sonnenschein, a kid fresh out of the academy (if two years and seventeen days could be called fresh- where did the critics get their information?) took his place. Timo was exceptional at his job, an excellent negotiator and a solid captain.
He had no enemies and his ethics were unshakable. He was the sort of kid you could laugh at for having too high dreams but still admire for his relentless struggle to them.
He was also one of the few willing to do a job no one else wanted.
A rash of retirements, deaths, and transfers had left the department sparse and largely unoccupied.
ØØØ
Juri groaned, quietly chasing the dream that was already fading from his mind. It had been a good one, something about work and a good case and Linke…
And it was gone. Juri got up, swinging his long legs over the side of the bed. He checked the clock. 7:52. If he hurried, he could get to the gym before work, get a swim in. That’d be nice.
Ten minutes later, the last alarm on his phone beeped. Turning it off one-handedly, Juri noticed Jan had sent him a text the night before. Juri sighed. He must have fallen asleep before it came. Jan kept odd hours, staying awake long after Juri’s body demanded sleep. He typed a quick apology and sent it, hoping the blonde wasn’t too mad. A niggling thought told him he cared because a mad ME would make for a horrible day at the morgue and not because it was his boyfriend who would be mad.
Jan didn’t send anything back. Juri pocketed the phone and stared blankly out the windows of the metro.
He really wished he remembered that dream.
I'm starting to wonder if I can do anything normally. It helps that my family is fucked up. We had a discussion at work the other day about family appreciation because one of the girls was hyberpolizing about her fourteen-year-old daughter and all the languages she can supposedly speak (I'm sorry, three years of high school Spanish is not the same as speaking a language). Now, besides the fact that I got inordinately jealous of this child for having learned Thai and Tagalog from her maternal and paternal grandmothers respectively, I was shocked enough to say that I wished my mother would talk about me like that.
This is not because my mother has no reason to be proud of me because I'm a fuckup and whatnot but because, as I told my coworkers, my mother feels no qualms about laughing at my nine-year-old brother's drawings because he added bellybuttons to stick figures.
Now, see, I'm not sure whether I'm an awful person or if I've been so brainwashed by this way of thinking that I not only don't find this morally wrong but funny. Bellybuttons. On stick figures. Why did that even occur to him? But, yeah, apparently this makes my mother a horrible person. There's something horribly offensive in having people who have never met your parents tell you that the way they raised you is fucked up. It's that stereotypical, only I can beat on her, you're not allowed to thing.
Also, I'm finding that even when I write notes for stories (and I'm totally 1/3 of the way through a new SVU fic. It's set four years and nine months before the current storyline and it's before Linke and Juri get together), I freak out when my sloppy ass handwriting makes it look like I'm misspelling words (which I ostensibly am not. I do not misspell words, not in English or any other language. I mistype and I memorize words wrong but I do not misspell. I do not think of a word and have to guess how to spell it. I memorize words the first time I see them.). My handwriting is a cross between cursive chickenscratch and shitty shorthand, where sometimes I'm positive you could read it clearly from across the room and other times I wonder if it's really Arabic. Then I try reading it backwards and sometimes it's actually recognizable. But, regardless, I end up going back and adding superscript h's and i's. It's always h's and i's, too. I dunno why.
So here's a rough preview of the new fic. Juri has been working for the SVU for three months, is partnered with Linke, and has been dating Jan almost as long:
The victim in the back of the delivery van lay like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Her legs were spread, blood and bloody tissue pooled between them. Juri’s nostrils flared as he forced his stomach back down. She had a long cut from just under her ribcage to her pelvis, blood matting the coarse curls there.
“The infant’s missing. It looks like she gave birth before she died.”
“So they took the baby and cut her open?”
Jan nodded.
“Call the NARC squad in,” Juri said, crouching beside the body.
“Why?” Linke asked.
“See that cut?” Juri pointed to the woman’s mutilated abdomen. “That’s how dealers get mules that don’t cooperate. If they try to run, the dealers find them and extract the goods. It can get messy,” he added at the look one of the officers gave him.
“Messy,” the man repeated.
“What is that?” Juri asked, pointing at the bloody mass on the floor. He felt queasy. He’d thought he’d gotten used to this.
Linke grinned unpleasantly. “That, my friend, is a placenta.”
ØØØ
Three months ago, the department captain of the SVU had stepped down and Timo Sonnenschein, a kid fresh out of the academy (if two years and seventeen days could be called fresh- where did the critics get their information?) took his place. Timo was exceptional at his job, an excellent negotiator and a solid captain.
He had no enemies and his ethics were unshakable. He was the sort of kid you could laugh at for having too high dreams but still admire for his relentless struggle to them.
He was also one of the few willing to do a job no one else wanted.
A rash of retirements, deaths, and transfers had left the department sparse and largely unoccupied.
ØØØ
Juri groaned, quietly chasing the dream that was already fading from his mind. It had been a good one, something about work and a good case and Linke…
And it was gone. Juri got up, swinging his long legs over the side of the bed. He checked the clock. 7:52. If he hurried, he could get to the gym before work, get a swim in. That’d be nice.
Ten minutes later, the last alarm on his phone beeped. Turning it off one-handedly, Juri noticed Jan had sent him a text the night before. Juri sighed. He must have fallen asleep before it came. Jan kept odd hours, staying awake long after Juri’s body demanded sleep. He typed a quick apology and sent it, hoping the blonde wasn’t too mad. A niggling thought told him he cared because a mad ME would make for a horrible day at the morgue and not because it was his boyfriend who would be mad.
Jan didn’t send anything back. Juri pocketed the phone and stared blankly out the windows of the metro.
He really wished he remembered that dream.