tea and inanity

Someone's story involved Character A believing Character B was terminally ill. In their initial draft, Character B deceived Character A – but that results in Character B coming across as super twisted, which doesn't really fit the vibe of the story. We discussed alternate possibilities and I said "You know, it's actually plausible that Character A could think that Character B was terminally ill without any deception required. In fact, my fiance thought I was terminally ill for several weeks at the beginning of our relationship."

Spring of 2023, my fiance and I were going on super casual dates. Emphasis on super casual, because most of the time they were like grocery store trips with dinner attached, and I thought they were platonic hangouts. I hadn't had so much as a crush by that point, so I was pretty clueless.

He was totally in love with me though and just playing it cool, because the guys at our school have an unfortunate reputation of practically proposing marriage on the first date (which kills the chance to organically get to know a person) and because he knew I would be easily spooked (unfortunately true).

After we went on a hike together (I invited the whole friend group, but only he came), I realized we were becoming good friends. On the ride back, right as he was dropping me off in front of my dorm, I told something that I told my good friends: I have a chronic illness called fibromyalgia. He was very quiet. I said goodbye and got out of the car and we didn't speak of it again.

From then on, I was pretty open about my chronic illness. I made a billion jokes about it and such. He always got weird and quiet when I did. I was sad about that. "Great," I thought, "yet another person who is weirded out by my health issues. I hoped he would be better than that."

Once I started suspecting that he was in love with me, I used that as evidence to gaslight myself into believing that we were just friends, because clearly he was too freaked out by my crazy illness to be in love with me, right?

But then he started hardcore pursuing me and asking me to hang out with him in some small way every single day, and in general being very kind and thoughtful and caring for me in every mundane way he could.

Then, several weeks later, he confessed his love. The story of the events leading up to that love confession are also very funny (involving migraines and an impassioned rant about Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy) but I will not bog this narrative down with the details. The next day, we had a good old-fashioned DTR. I told him I reciprocated his feelings and then, because I was still bothered by how weird he got whenever I brought up my chronic illness, I said "Oh, by the way, I'm super open with talking about my fibromyalgia, so feel free to ask me any questions if you're curious about how it works!"

He said, very earnestly, "Are you dying?".

Rewind to the day we went on that hike. I say I have a chronic illness. He completely misses what it's called (I guess "fibromyalgia" doesn't stick in the brain) and just hears chronic illness. I was the first chronically ill person he had met before and the wires got crossed in his mind and he mistook it for terminal illness. He didn't want to ask, though, because he assumed it was a very sensitive matter.

A couple days later, he overheard me have a conversation with another chronically ill friend about death and suffering and Christian hope. In that conversation, I said (quoting Sarah Sparks) "you know, with this chronic illness, every day I'm learning how to die."

He took that as confirmation of his suspicions: I was dying. He told no one. He just bore that silently for weeks. When I made jokes about my terminal illness, he thought I was being very brave, but did not have the heart to joke along with me.

Fast forward back to the DTR conversation. After I find this out, I laugh in his face for like ten minutes (poor guy). I ask follow-up questions, like

Q: How did you cope with the fact I was dying?

A: I just decided I wanted to spend as much time with you as I can, for the time I had left, and then when the time came I'd cross that bridge when I get there.

Q: When did you think I was dying?

A: Well, I figured there was no way you would move to [UNGLAMOROUS COLLEGE TOWN] in your last year of life, so I figured you had like...five years, maybe?

He was so matter-of-fact about it. After I stopped laughing, I was deeply moved. Here I was, thinking that this guy was freaked out by my chronic illness, when all along he was quietly preparing to weather my terminal illness with me for the rest of my life.

A week later, in a follow-up conversation, I asked, "So is the reason why you've been so kind to me was because you thought I was dying?" and he replied, "Nope! My behavior was not conditional. I wasn't kind to you because you could die. I was kind to you because I could die at any time, and I want to be like Jesus in whatever time I have left."

I would never pay money for a redbox. if you ask politely and are very very persistent (i.e. annoying) they will let you take it away

here's my dad and i taking it away

luckily there are no shortage of freaks like us who will just take them away on our own volition. we did it all "by the book", too: we set up cones and caution tape, disconnected electricity properly, used an angle grinder to grind down the bolts in the concrete so nobody would trip on them, then cleaned everything up afterward and sealed off the electrical panel so the store would know everything is safe and tidy. though they were hesitant when we were first contacting them, they were honestly very relieved and grateful when we finally took it away, especially once they saw that we "knew what we were doing" (we don't) and look like we've "done this before" (we haven't).

the fun part: the reason why this redbox, in particular, was completely full and unraided is because the computer hardware inside had failed some months before the bankruptcy, and a failing company sure as hell wasn't gonna send a tech out to our podunk dipshit city to fix it, so it was impossible to rent movies or take any discs out. plus, for who knows how long, people were returning old redbox discs to this machine and not taking any out, leading to a much higher variety of movies than your average redbox.

there is a thriving community of redbox hackers and modders out there, as well, creating open-source software for repurposing the machines and not letting their very interesting and robust disc-management hardware go to waste. this one belongs to my brother (who was very annoying persistent and did all the legwork of contacting managers and securing permission) who is a programmer by trade and will be hacking it into a family-access movie library, with whatever discs we want. i mean the machine is completely weatherproof and has a built-in AC unit, it would be such a waste to not try to turn it into something cool.

if we get another one, i'm gonna try to mod it into some sort of art or zine vending machine. the disc boxes are just the right size for small print art or stickers. would make a great "little free library" too.

* typo along the lines of a spelling error, the wrong your/you're or there/their/they're used, etc. ** in this scenario, a comment is the only way to get in touch with the fic author, no social media dm option

So much about Naboo culture is infuriating from a logical standpoint. They have a queen, okay. A constitutionally elected queen? Weird, okay. Don't know why they'd do that but... She's FOURTEEN? Excuse me? Is it a ceremonial thing or, oh no it's not? Legit head of state? Why does she dress like that? Why does she talk like that? I'm so tired.

Here's the explainer. Let me go cook.

There's this joke in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the last living human goes back in time and finds out humans aren't actually from Earth, but an alien culture that tricked all the middle managers, pedantic weirdos, and other infuriating folk into getting in a space arc which they gave the wrong evacuation coordinates to simply get rid of them. The Naboo are like this but they're all artists and poets and hippies, but like classy ones. They fled their home planet during a war and crash landed on Naboo, then did a colonism to the Gungans because, hey, they were fleeing a war and it was do or die. This spiritual rot in their creation story is later rectified by Padmé. But it's super important to their cultural psychology. They're hippies, but will subjugate if needed. They are "peaceful" but I guarantee you every single one of them has a tiny extremely shiny pistol up their sleeve and they will draw down on you if backed against a wall.

The scene that I think says it all is at the end of Phantom Menace when Padmé is surrounded by Nute Gunray and his droids, they've got her dead to rights, but Sabé her double creates a distraction so the queen can make it to her throne. This one piece of furniture is the Naboo in a nutshell. It's richly carved with artistic details, it has two seats to the side so the queen's handmaidens can read the lips of people in the back of the room and use hand signals to communicate with the queen while she can remain focused mostly on who is speaking to her. It is hundreds of years old. And it has a secret compartment in the armrest that is FULL OF GUNS. Layers of artistic opulence hiding their true intentions.

The Naboo were created to be backwards compatible with Princess Leia. They're compassionate pacifists, but they will shot you if needed.

Why do they elect teenage royalty? It's a little creepy. It's giving "age of consent is emotional maturity". It makes no sense.

The explanation they give outsiders is they want youthful idealism untainted by cynicism. What they don't tell you is that they take kids with stated interest in politics and put them in an advanced highly competitive Leadership Academy which is like Model UN mixed with Battle Royale. Well, they don't kill each other but it's intense. It's like what the clones went though just all diplomacy training and tea ceremonies all the time. Which is crazy but so Naboo.

Oh, and all the delegates for the royalty election run using pseudonyms for security. Imagine voting for the head of state but you can't run a background check. It's so crazy.

Why does Padmé dress like that? Well, fashion is one of Naboo's major industries so it's like she's wearing the entire Fall line catalog at once. To advertise not only the talent of her people, but to show how much they favor her. BUT that dress has multiple layers of padding and resin armor. And aforementioned spots for those little silver blasters. And it breaks up her silhouette making her harder to shoot. And it's so elaborate you pay more attention to the crazy dress and not if the person wearing it is really the queen or a decoy. Everything about Naboo is like this.

Queen Amidala has that weird accent while Padmé does not. Because all her handmaidens helped create the accent together so they all can imitate it. It's like if you gave girls at a rowdy sleepover the job of federal counterintelligence. That's what they came up with.

The handmaidens wear colorful identical clothes so you can't tell them apart, hoods to partially conceal their identity, and they don't wear the queen's fancy makeup. So one of them can be the queen and spy on people in the audience. Because the Naboo don't trust shit for shit.

Their public face is so silly to hide all the truly weird shit they do behind the scenes.

They use their reputation as artist hippies to conceal multiple layers of subterfuge and disguise their methods of self defense and assuage their paranoia due to wartime trauma and their disturbing colonial past. All of them are completely off their rocker even by Star Wars standards. And I love them so much. They put on a show so everyone thinks they have them figured out but what they have going on is far more weirder and more sinister than meets the eye. You know how catty, neurotic, and competitive art school students stereotypically are? Yeah, planet art student. Love them!

like...a planet destroying laser is pretty Sith Lord, and having a Galactic Empire is classically Sith, but faking your way into being Emperor via elaborate indirect election fraud and a whole faked-up proxy war, and mounting your hyperspace-capable space laser on a deeply gratuitous whole-ass artificial moon? there's distinct traces of Naboo aesthetic sensibility showing through there.

The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely. 

I was also in JROTC. I have flown naval helicopters, because on Navy air bases they think, "Oh shit you have a 16-year-old with solo wings? Think she'd like to fly this Chinook?" instead of anything sane.

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don’t write on ao3