this is the dimension of imagination.

Penny Rose: Babbles in Baby

All of tumblr collectively at my husband:

Husband: you don’t even have to understand taxes yet! I can explain them but you’ve got several years before that’s relevant!

Penny Rose: wide eyes, staring at her father, almost intrigued

Usually when I get a hyperfixation outta nowhere for a completed series, I spend a week, maybe two going through old fanfiction and fanart, and then I burn through what's left, and then I'm done.

Danny Phantom has a pile of fanfiction and fanart that's been growing steadily since, and I cannot emphasize this enough, 2004, and there are still people putting out multiple things every single day. I'm already like 20 AUs in and I've been up till 2:00am every single night this week because I've found a new enormous fascinating fanfic that was so good I could not physically make myself sleep until I finished it.

Me: 

Yes, she shouldn’t have hurt her friends, but she was also accurate in her assessment that Buffy was being a huge fucking hypocrite about the whole thing. It’s also probably true that if Giles hadn’t been a condescending, finger waving jackass about her addiction problems or hadn’t decided to abandon them all at the ripe old age of 21 and ask them to take care of an entire town, the world, and a teenage girl by themselves that things wouldn’t have gotten so bad.

The reason Xander was able to successfully reach out to her and keep her from ending the world wasn’t just because Giles had lowered her defenses, it was because he was the only one telling her he would love and support her through anything: up to, and including, bringing about the apocalypse. He didn’t bullshit about all the beauty and goodness in a world that had been steadily falling apart for all of them for the past year. He didn’t admonish her or tell her Tara would be ashamed. He just told her that despite the trauma, despite the addiction, despite being villainized for being gay, and angry, and imperfect, and not forgiving the people who caused Tara’s death, indirectly or otherwise, she was exactly the same person she was when we met her in season one.

Dr. Z. was, easily, the best and most competent doctor or dentist I’ve ever encountered – and after that accident, I encountered quite a number. He came stunningly highly recommended, had an excellent record, and the most calming bedside manner I’ve ever seen.

That last wasn’t the sweet gentle caretaking sort of manner, which some nurses have but you wouldn’t expect to see in a surgeon. No; when Dr. Z. told me that one of my broken molars was too badly damaged to save, and I (being seventeen and still moderately in shock) broke down crying, he stared at me incredulously and said, in a tone of utter bemusement, “But – I am very good.”

I stopped crying on the spot. In the last twenty-four hours or so of one doctor after another, no one had said anything that reassuring to me. He clearly just knew his own competence so well that the idea of someone being scared anyway was literally incomprehensible to him. What more could I possibly ask for?

(He was right. The procedure was very extended, because the tooth that needed to be removed was in bits, but there was zero pain at any point. And, as he promised, my teeth were so close together that they shifted to fill the gap to where there genuinely is none anymore, it’s just a little easier to floss on that side.)

But Dr. Z.’s insane competence wasn’t just limited to oral surgery.

When I met Dr. Z., he, like most doctors I’ve had, asked me if I was in college, and where, and what I was studying. When I say “math,” most doctors respond with “oh, wow, good for you” or possibly “what do you want to do with that after college?”

Dr. Z. wanted to know what kind of math.

I gave him the thirty-second layman’s summary that I give people who are foolish enough to ask that. He responded with “oh, you mean–” and the correct technical terms. I confirmed that was indeed what I meant (and keep in mind, this was upper-division college math, you don’t take this unless you’re a math major). He asked cogent follow-up questions, and there ensued ten or so minutes of what I’d call “small talk” except for how it was an intensely technical mathematical discussion.

He didn’t, as far as I can tell, have any kind of formal math background. He just … knew stuff.

I was a competitive fencer at this point in time, so when he asked if I had any questions about the surgery that would be necessary, I asked him if I’d be okay to fence while I had my jaw wired shut, or if it would interfere with breathing.

“Fencing?” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “like swordfighting,” because this is another conversation I got to have a lot. (People assume they’ve misheard you, or occasionally they think you mean building fences.)

“Which weapon?”

“Uh. Foil.”

“No, it won’t be safe,” and he went off into an explanation of why.

Turns out, he was also a serious fencer – and, when I mentioned my fencing coach, an old friend of his. (I asked my fencing coach later, and, oh yes, Dr. Z., a good friend of mine, excellent fencer.) (My coach was French. Dr. Z. was Israeli. I never saw Dr. Z. around the club or anything. I have no idea how they knew each other.)

So this was weird enough that later, when I was home, I looked Dr. Z. up on Yelp. His reviews were stellar, of course, but that wasn’t the weird thing.

The weird thing was that the reviews were full of people – professionals in lots of different fields – saying the same thing: I went to Dr. Z. for oral surgery, and he asked me about what I did, and it turned out he knew all about my field and had a competent and educated discussion with me about the obscure technical details of such-and-such.

All sorts of different fields, saying this. Lawyers. Businessmen. Musicians.

As far as I can tell, it’s not that I just happened to be pursuing the two fields he had a serious amateur interest in – he just seemed to be extremely good at literally everything.

I have no explanation for this. Possibly he sold his soul to the devil.

Burshies