Pro-Info-Dump Zone!

I’d been interning with her as an artist/executive assistant for some time. To put a long story short she’d developed a tremor that kept her from doing a certain amount of studio work, so in between sending emails and invoices for her I’d chip in and help with line art or drafting on longer projects. A lot of it was the two of us sitting in her basement studio, doing our own thing, waiting for the phone to ring. We got to talking a lot. I’d just moved across the country and was still finding my footing.

There was a handyman she had over occasionally — he was a personal friend who enjoyed her company more than she enjoyed his. She didn’t dislike him by any means, but he definitely had feelings for her that she didn’t reciprocate. One day, after he’d come over to repair something-or-other and left, she and I started talking about relationships.

She asked if I had a boyfriend. I told her I wasn’t interested in being in a relationship with anyone and that I’d never had a desire to be in a relationship. Admittedly, I was bracing for the “You’ll meet the right person someday” response. I knew it generally came from a place of care, but it never changed how much I dreaded to hear it. I really respected my mentor and I was prepared to nod along to whatever response she gave me. Instead of anything I expected her to say, she just kind of nodded and said, “Me neither. I think I’m — what’s the term — asexual?”

I was ecstatic. I told her I was asexual, too. I saw her sigh in relief, the same way I did. I couldn’t believe it.

We didn’t get much work done that day, we just started talking about our experiences. She’d been married once when she was younger and even during that period of her life her disinterest in a sexual relationship didn’t change. She had a roommate after graduating college who confessed to having feelings for her and she had to tell her “It’s not that I don’t like girls, it’s that I don’t like anybody.” The roommate harbored enough bitterness over this that they had to split ways. Her mother told her that she would quote “rather have a gay daughter than a daughter who didn’t fancy anyone at all” unquote.

I didn’t have nearly as many experiences as she did, but I was able to share my own for the first time. I shared how it was easier to say I was taking time to work on myself than to say I had no interest in being in a relationship. We talked about the words “You’ll meet the right person someday” and “You’ll know when you’re in love” and “Don’t worry, one day you’ll meet some guy that changes everything.” As if something was broken.

“I’ve been alive for sixty five years,” my mentor told me, “and I’ve never felt like I was missing something, even if everybody told me I was.”

Currently, my mentor lives with her parrot, her cats, and her backyard-wildlife pals in a house that she owns. She makes art and hosts community art groups and volunteers at care homes and is the most self-fulfilled woman I’ve ever met. And she loves her life. She loves the people she knows and they love her, too. If I could be half as cool as she is when I grow up, I think that’d be pretty amazing.

I, knowing that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, waited carefully for the lab director to be deep in conversation with someone else on the other side of the laboratory. And then I took my chance.

Test tubes, as it turns out, are really bad as shot glasses. Their shape turns any liquid inside into a stream, so you really can't knock it back quickly - it takes a couple seconds. Additionally, the best way I can describe the taste of virus concentrate was "sterile rot". A very unique kind of bad! Made worse by the test tube's inefficiency as a shot glass.

(by the way we were studying bacteriophages, not animal viruses. these viruses are too specialized on attacking prokaryotes to even recognize our cells as targets at all, according to studies.)

(but also like. if the viruses managed to successfully switch hosts and killed me with a violent infection, itd still be worth it.)

now go in peace

Traveling Troupe (놀이패) AU

Alien: "You're an asshole."

Human: "I didn't 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 there would be a thunderstorm today."

(The odd pair wait sitting across from each other under the roof of a bus stop. Rain pitter patters loudly on the walls.)

Alien: "How did you not know? You have an app to check the weather."

Human: "Ah, yeah. I forgot."

Human: "It's usually wrong anyway. Just give it thirty minutes."

Alien: (Resting their elbow on their knee, and their face in their hand.) "Thirty minutes? Try an hour. I haven't seen a storm this bad in all the months I've been assigned to Earth."

Human: "Eh, the rain is kind of wishy washy in Florida. What looks like an hour long thunder storm could turn out to be a ten minute shower."

Alien: "Really?"

Human: "Oh, yeah. And then out of nowhere you get hit by a hurricane because it randomly changed directions."

Alien: "... What."

Human: "And then if you live in a cold enough place, you get a surprise snow in - or sometimes on the one day you want snow, absolutely nothing comes down."

Human: "In some places it gets so hot that fires start all on their own."

Alien: "I'm 𝘴𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘺? The temperatures sometimes reach the point that fucking 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘦 just... spawns??"

Humans: "Oh, and in some places, there are these giant funnels of wind that destroy everything in their path. Something about hot and cold wind blowing together... not totally sure what causes that."

Alien: "𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘮𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺."

Human: "S'just weather."

Characters belong to: jooshroom, @izu, @otaku553,@coolskeleton80085, lonelydancer