#firewolf826

Until I was about 16 I didn’t really see snow. Now and then when we lived in Sacramento my parents drove us up to Lake Tahoe to wander about in snow that was probably better suited to skiing than to anything children might use snow for. It was dry and ordinary, and to be honest, I best remember the trip that ended in us having to turn around and go home early rather than any of the others we took, though I’m pretty sure there were some.

Winter in southern California ranges from a balmy 60 to a what-feels-frigid-at-the-time 40. Rain, mostly. Never snow. Not by the coast.

It wasn’t until we moved out to Virginia that I first saw real snow, and even then, we didn’t get a whole lot the first couple years I lived there.

It doesn’t bother me, though now and then I sort of step back and look objectively at my life, and there’s a lot of experiences I just don’t quite get…

Snowball fights and fortsShoveling the sidewalk just to get to the school busBuying road salt by the bagSnow tiresBundling up in snow pants just to get to school

Despite having moved somewhere around 10 times in my life to date…I never had that.

Ares: opinion on war

I very much fall into the category of “you can disagree with the war all you like but support the soldiers.” Perhaps that’s true almost by necessity, having grown up an Army brat (do not make me watch videos of soldiers coming home to their families or not making it home at all unless you WANT to make me cry in a corner by myself), but that’s still how I feel about it.

I think fighting is something we’re inclined toward as part of human nature. I think war is regrettable and awful and tragic, but sometimes inevitable, based on its nature as the final escalation of a frustration between two parties. For the entire history of the human race, when two sides disagree on something fundamental (revenge, resource allotment, ownership of goods, services, or people), the final option is always going to be violent conflict. We will always need soldiers, we will always need confidence in our ability to defend ourselves. All we can do is try not to go to war over stupid shit like “he lied to me” or “I want this and I feel powerful enough to defy anyone who tells me no.”

Athena: share a piece of wisdom

Predictable, I know, but the one I always always go back to is the story of Solomon’s Ring.

The way I learned it as a wee bab out of an illustrated book of Jewish bible stories, the story goes like this:

There was a jeweler in Jerusalem who boasted that he made the best rings in the world. King Solomon heard of this, and demanded that he prove his claim: the jeweler was to make for King Solomon a ring that would cheer him when he was sad, but that would also humble him when he was happy. The jeweler was terrified, but when the time came, he made for King Solomon a very plain ring, with a very simple inscription:

“This too, shall pass.”

Poseidon: list three fears

I fear failure, abandonment, and lack of fulfillment.

ooooh you picked FUN ones > u >

Sugawara: Tell me about a time where you didn’t give up.

Hmmm…

A few times while I was seeing a therapist last summer I thought really hard about just…not going back. It was too hard, she was asking questions that were just making me more upset rather than making me feel better, or the time commitment was causing trouble at work, or whatever. I had a long list of excuses not to keep going back that I kept cycling through.

I don’t have a big rousing statement to explain how I overcame that, unfortunately, but I knew I had nowhere to go but up. So I kept just…putting those thoughts on shelves, telling myself I would come back to it (I’d always forget), or that I’d decide later; “oh, it’d be harder to stop than to keep going, anyway,” kinds of things. And then summer was over and I moved out of state and had to stop anyway, and I’d made it through after all.

Tanaka: Are you overprotective of your friends?

This gets a resounding YES actually. I think the only reason I’m not completely obnoxious to everyone who knows me well is that I don’t usually ACT on it, but holy shit, wrong someone I care about and GURL WE GON’ HAVE AN ISSUE.

As an example… I’m not overly secretive about the fact that I don’t usually Get Angry. I’m not an angry person— I don’t go into rages; I feel frustrated, or irritated, or grumpy, or even what I would describe as being “mad,” but I usually don’t feel anger. Except when my friends or loved ones are getting fucked with. The last time I can remember getting Seriously Angry was when a kid on the school bus was bullying my little brother, and the last time I can remember getting Actually Pretty Pissed Off (if you will) was when I found out someone — who was by the way, effectively nearly a stranger to me, but in my brain I had decided “this person is a friend and I care about their wellbeing” — was being jerked around really bad by someone they cared about a lot.

I try really hard not to be like…stifling or overbearing, which I would say is different from overprotective (but easy to have overlap)? I won’t usually pick fights unless I feel like nobody else is going to handle it, but I have caused some trouble now and then by either actually approaching someone I find to be causing a problem, or, at minimum, making my distaste known pretty blatantly, with someone who’s hurting my friends.

(One more fun anecdote: when one of my absolute closest friends started dating this new guy, I had a whole speech prepared to explain to him in no uncertain terms that if he hurt her he would have to deal with ME, the closest thing to an older brother she was gonna get. Turned out he’s a super cool dude and I never had to give that speech, but MAN, I had that locked and loaded.)

Hinata: Have you ever become friends with someone you initially disliked?

This one’s sort of interesting because I don’t often dislike people when I meet them right off the bat— for someone with a boatload of trust issues I’m extremely trusting on like, a really superficial tier? It takes a LOT to give me like, skeevy weird “this person is not great” vibes such that I would hold someone’s at arm’s length.

Though as everyone who has met me in person knows, I am STARTLINGLY standoffish and chilly the first time I interact with people. I swear I’m not doing it on purpose, it’s not that I don’t like you, my brain is just somewhere else. (Related: I apologize to anyone who has ever flirted with me ever. I have no idea that’s what you’re doing and have no idea how to reciprocate even if I want to. :|)

All that said, I think the closest I have to a “yes” to this question is Alan, unclewhisky, because while I didn’t dislike him at first, he was odd and very much a satellite to the same groups I was a satellite to, and he was The One Boy in my solar system of like seven women plus me. We sort of ended up in some weird clumsily aligned orbit, loosely polite acquaintances who kept passing in the dark without really connecting for like…two and a half years, in college, before we started going to bars together and hanging out more.

and now, fuckin’ like seven and a half YEARS after meeting each other, we’ve been living together for going on 5 years and we’re near inseparable.

So.

Y’know.

Sugawara: Tell me about a time where you didn’t give up.

I can’t think of anything major for this, so I hope more of a mundane answer suffices for this, aha. I guess in general rugby practice tends to kick my ass (I suck at catching passes, and the other night our coach made us run full field terribles (10 pushups, sprint down the field, 10 situps, sprint back, 9 pushups, and so on until you reach zero)), but I still try to put in my best effort no matter how hard it gets! 

Kageyama: Favorite kind of juice box?

I don’t drink much other than water these days, but when I was a kid, I really liked Hi-C juice boxes, as well as those plastic Kool-Aid bottles with the twist off tops!

Yamaguchi: What is your biggest insecurity?

americano: do you find the ocean frightening?

This is a really interesting question to me because prior to reading it I hadn’t really ever thought about it? But…ultimately, no. The ocean itself doesn’t fill me with primal fear or anything. I miss it a lot, actually— when my family lived in SoCal we went to the beach a lot more often and I spent a lot of time simply sitting on rocks and watching the waves come in and out. There’s a certain comfort in the cosmic insignificance of one human life in the face of the everconstant march of the tide, I think. And I have many very fond memories of a 4th grade whalewatching trip and of drum lessons on a little boat in the Long Beach harbor.

That said, there are things IN the ocean that creep me the fuck out or frighten me. Like when I got to be a teenager I got scared off of interacting with kelp because I’d heard sometimes jellyfish get tangled up in it and they might sting you when you touch it… I have a (I think healthy) wariness of riptide, and the weirder-looking fish like barracuda and anglerfish (I MEAN ANGLERFISH THO) creep me out some?

I don’t have a particularly strong fear of sharks though, if only because generally speaking, the likelihood of me encountering one personally while paddling about on a beach is so low that I’m not too worried.

…but if I’m wrong about those odds, nobody tell me.

frappe: do you cook carefully or improvise?

This one kinda depends, I think. During college I taught myself how to cook chicken by screwing around with adding random spices and white wine while cooking boneless breasts in a skillet, but I don’t do that as often anymore. There’s a lot of techniques I know OF and don’t know how to actually DO, which limits the options I perceive as being available to me while cooking. (Though I’m slowly learning. Mostly by living with Alan, who makes up for my lack of experimentation by being a veritable mad scientist when he’s in front of a stove.)

I generally have very very plain tastes, so absurdly simple things (like “pan-sear chicken with like two spices, spoon out over some rice, also steam broccoli”) are usually what I default to, so the idea of throwing a bunch of (seemingly) random tastes together to see if it works feels like a lot of work for no payoff, I guess?

30 Day Cosplay Photography Challenge : Day 8 ★Your photography plans for the rest of the year (if you have no more for this year, then do next year!)★

bloodstone:what words are most comforting to you?

Hmmm I'm not sure? It really depends on the situation. I do find that I need reassurance about schoolwork from time to time;; imposter syndrome runs strong in academia.

moonstone:what family do you want in the future?

I'm not sure I want children so it'll be with a partner, pets cats, friends, etc :> even if I did get married I want my own room haha I go a little nuts if I don't have my own space.