Just Me

Nothing. You get it fixed, or you don’t. Whatevs.

You know what actually happens when you are depressed or sick or on your period and don’t cook dinner?

Nothing. You still get to eat something, nobody scolds you, it doesn’t have any real bearing on your future success, and you don’t get soft shunned for a week by your family.

You know what actually happens when you break stuff, forget stuff, get sick, fall asleep, are rude, miss a flight, don’t know how to do XYZ thing on fixing cars or canning food or whatever, lose things, get lost because you can’t read a map and forgot to charge your phone, buy the wrong groceries, plant the wrong plants, not make your bed, make your bed wrong, jump on your bed, sleep on your bed, eat crackers in your bed, have emotions literally anywhere?

Nothing.

Nothing happens.

No one is mad.

No one can hurt you, and if they do there are laws saying they can’t and that it’s an actual crime with legal consequences.

All there are are outcomes and different paths and different problems and different situations and you just bumble your way forward into dealing with those and that’s it. That’s the whole thing. It’s not the wrong choice, having problems isn’t indicative of your inherent badness or inadequacy or lack of applying yourself. It’s just life, and it’s happening to literally everyone.

I’m not even kidding.

You just do stuff and nothing bad happens. Walk around existing? Nothing bad will happen. Wild.

I got told to "take care of it soon please" and let go with a warning. Today I went to the DMV and paid a $5 late fee along with the 2-year fee for registration, got new plates and stickers and that was that.

A year late. No big deal. No one was shocked or appalled. It was just a thing that happened and then I took care of it. No biggie.

Me, ears perking up: “Great! Can I have their name?”

Customer: “It’s Stephanie ____”

Steven Moffat Appreciation Day 2015

Steven Moffat’s poetics is very unique in many ways. There are several characteristic features that come to my mind when somebody mentions Moffat’s Doctor Who. I think of that fairy tale vibe appearing in most of his works, ordinary things as dust or statues turned into scary monsters, exploring the consequences of the Doctor’s deeds, myths and legends, and… poems. Moffat, more often than his co-workers, includes his own short poems in his scripts. They are a lovely touch that perfectly fits Moffat’s lyrical style.

Those poems are very simple, there are no complicated figures of speech. I’d more likely call them nursery rhymes, strict in their rhythm and simple in rhymes. However, these poems are very rich with symbolism. Just look at them and read them again and think about how they accompany the story. Yes, they don’t only accompany the story, they tell the story. They beautifully summarize the central thought or the plot and tell them in a concentrated, but a very accurate way. How beautiful is that? Steven transforms his stories into nursery rhymes which works as intertexts within the scripts.

The four-line stanza from The Time of the Doctor describes the upcoming regeneration, comparing the Doctor’s lives to the clock - yes, some people might consider it too obvious and cheesy, but on the other hand, nobody used this metaphor in the show before. Another thing is the poem from The Beast Below which describes not only the episode itself but could also be considered a characterization of the newly regenerated 11th Doctor and the story arc of series 5. Same goes for the poem whispered by the terrifying Whispermen, reminding us that the Doctor won’t live forever and his journey is about to end at Trenzalore. The quote Such a lovely old song. But is it about him? speaks for itself. The story of the Doctor echoes throughout the universe. There are so many theories about him and River and this is one of them, formed in a catchy rhyme, a story about love and death, read by children’s voices. And perhaps Demons run when a good man goes to war… is one of them, as well; the fight for little Melody, captured in hauntingly beautiful words, read by grown-up River herself – to me, this is the most powerful scene in the whole episode. The last poem we’ve heard was used in Listen, telling a horror myth about something under your bed. A poem that made the Doctor travel to the end of the universe to find out whether there was a grain of truth hidden in the rhyme.

a young elephant kneeling down in front of their car in a playful way and throwing zebra bones at the researchers, trying to get them to play with him

an 8-month-old elephant trying and failing to pick up some grass with her trunk (the author: “it reminds me of someone learning to use chopsticks”) and whose mother then pulled a sheaf of grass and ate it while making sure her daughter was watching the demonstration

baby elephants suck their trunk for comfort (as we all know!!) but also like to swing and whirl it around as they try to figure out what it can do and how to use it, and sometimes accidentally step on their trunk and trip over it

“often, babies reach with their trunks into the mouths of family members, taking a bit of what they’re eating”

all the female elephants in a family rushing over to help when someone’s baby trips and falls, while making comforting vocalisations

an enormous adult male elephant walking up to a family group and making an exaggerated display of nonchalance, with his trunk casually draped over his tusk, to show the other elephants that he’s not scary

researchers messing with an elephant family by collecting a bit of urine when the elephant walking at the back of the group stopped to pee, then driving some distance to leave the urine ahead of them. “When they encountered fresh urine from an elephant they knew was behind them, they seemed truly baffled, as though thinking, “Wait a minute—how’d she pass us? She’s back behind us!”

mothers instructing their babies to switch to the other side of their body and walk in their shade when the day is very hot

an elephant child trying to climb all over a bigger male teenager who was lying down for a nap, receiving a kick in response, and running back to its mother in alarm—then the teenager followed and lay down flat beside them as if to apologise and invite the child to climb onto him again

elephant children throwing tantrums when they are being weaned and their mother blocks them from nursing (“He got so upset, pushing her, poking her and tusking her, […] it was like, ‘Ooh, I hate you!”)

researchers followed a family that included a baby who was born disabled, with twisted forelegs that he couldn’t straighten. The entire elephant family (from the adults to the baby’s 8-year-old sister) nurtured him, patiently helping him up every time he fell over, “slowing their pace to his disabilities, continually turning to watch his progress, waiting as he caught up from behind” until (after a few days) the little one managed to straighten his legs and learn to walk normally

a researcher once saw an elephant pluck up some grass and place it in the mouth of another elephant whose trunk was badly injured. Also adults are sometimes seen carrying sick baby elephants on their tusks

a researcher saw a baby elephant who was wary of going into the water, wrap her trunk around her mother’s tusk as her mother patiently entered the river with her, like a child nervously grabbing her mother’s arm