update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/motes/006.md

@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 
 Motes had, at one point, started to play.
 
-That is how time's inevitable arrow works, after all, is it not? There was a time when Motes was not, when she had not yet existed, and then there was a point at which she began, and from then on, she existed. Her presence was in the world, and it was undeniable. There were witnesses. There were knock-on effects. She undeniably *was.*
+That is how time's inevitable arrow works, after all, is it not? There was a time when Motes was not, when she had not yet existed, and then there was a point at which she began, and from then on, she existed. Her presence was in the world, and it was undeniable. There were witnesses. There were knock-on effects. She inescapably *was.*
 
 And so, there was a time at which she did not play, did not surround herself with play, did not define herself by it, and then there was a point at which she began to play. It was a starting point. It was an inflection point, at which she collided with the idea of play and her trajectory was changed.
 
@@ -16,13 +16,13 @@ Roly-poly Michelle Hadje, 263 years ago, sitting in kindergarten, shitty paintbr
 
 Silly, roly-poly Michelle Hadje in her dirt-brown corduroys splotched with a patch of red from having sat down directly in a puddle of paint. It was not a drip so easily wiped away but well and truly ground into the ridged fabric of her trousers.
 
-"Oh! Miss Hadje! Michelle, Michelle, Michelle!" her teacher had tutted. Miss Willard always looked as though she regretted that she was not able to scruff children, to lift them off the ground and give them a good shake, or perhaps to rub their noses in the messes they made like some naughty pooch. "Your mother will be so upset, won't she?"
+"Oh! Miss Hadje! Michelle, Michelle, Michelle!" her teacher tutted. Miss Willard always looked as though she regretted that she was not able to scruff children, to lift them off the ground and give them a good shake, or perhaps to rub their noses in the messes they made like some naughty pooch. "Your mother will be so upset, won't she?"
 
 And Michelle cried. She cried because — people-pleaser her — she wanted nothing other than to be a good girl. She wanted her teacher to like her. She wanted her mother to love her. She wanted to be good and to never risk that love, and here she was, being told that she had done wrong, that her mother would be upset!
 
-It was all so silly! She was a kid! She was five and a half! Of course she was going to get messy. Of course there would be paint on her hands, and so why should there not also be paint on her pants? She was a kid and she was clumsy and a mess like that was just a part of her life.
+It was all so silly! She was a kid! She was five and a half! Of course she was going to get messy. Of course there would be paint on her hands, and so why should there not also be paint on her pants? She was a kid and she was clumsy, and a mess like that was just a part of her life.
 
-Her mother had picked her sobbing daughter up from school, and after much cajoling, much reassuring her that she would not abandon her, would not leave her by the side of the road to be picked up by...who exactly? She reassured her that the paint stain was fine, and that she would have a chat with Miss Willard. When your daughter's neurodivergence presents itself in anxiety, perhaps you get used to reassuring her that you love her, and when you are mother, perhaps you never tire of doing so.
+Her mother picked her sobbing daughter up from school, and after much cajoling, much reassuring her that she would not abandon her, would not leave her by the side of the road to be picked up by...who exactly? She reassured her that the paint stain was fine, and that she would have a chat with Miss Willard. When your daughter's neurodivergence presents itself in anxiety, perhaps you get used to reassuring her that you love her, and when you are mother, perhaps you never tire of doing so.
 
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@@ -32,15 +32,15 @@ She is going to be a Motes who gets kicked from sims, who gets barred from entry
 
 She will be a Motes who gets sneered at. She will be scolded for some vague infraction, impropriety, some sin against God, against man, against the sanctity of the System. Or perhaps she will be a Motes who is studiously ignored. She will be the one others cross the street to avoid, the one others stay away from lest they be tainted with transgression by association.
 
-She is also going to be a Motes who inspires feelings of protection, of care, of *joie de vivre.* She is going to be one who is going to show the hedonism in play, one whose *raison d'être* is to have fun, and inspire in others a sense of compersion for that fun. She is going to be a Motes who makes one want to play in turn. She is going to be the one you want to hold in your lap, the one you want to call adorable, the one you want to hold close and protect from pain.
+She is also going to be a Motes who inspires feelings of protection, of care, of *joie de vivre.* She is going to be one who shows the hedonism in play, one whose *raison d'être* is to have fun, and inspire in others a sense of compersion for that fun. She is going to be a Motes who makes one want to play in turn. She is going to be the one you want to hold in your lap, the one you want to call adorable, the one you want to hold close and protect from pain.
 
 -----
 
-Sometime in the late 2100s, Motes was invited to a weird hyperformal event, one of Rye's book releases. She and her cocladists, her friends, all grumbled about it for their own reasons. It was all well and good to dress up in a skirt, but a dress? Fuck that. 
+Sometime in the late 2100s, Motes was invited to a strange, hyper-formal event, one of Rye's book releases. She and her cocladists, her friends, all grumbled about it for their own reasons. 
 
-Warmth dressed in its best mixture of clothes, something that shifted slowly over time between masculine and feminine, and yet those in attendance addressed em as almost exclusively ‘she’, and partway through, they pulled Motes aside to have a little grumbly bitch session. The bitch session quickly turned into into an emotional wave, a tide rolling inexorably in, and Motes burst into tears. She had dressed up in a fine black dress, hip-hugging and chic, and it was making her absolutely miserable.
+Warmth dressed in its best mixture of clothes, something that shifted slowly over time between masculine and feminine, and yet those in attendance addressed em as almost exclusively 'she', and partway through, they pulled Motes aside to have a little grumbly bitch session. The bitch session quickly turned into into an emotional wave, a tide rolling inexorably in, and Motes burst into tears. She had dressed up in a fine black dress, hip-hugging and chic, and it was making her absolutely miserable.
 
-As Warmth and her partner, Hold My Name, comforted her, four or five Warmths surrounding her while Hold My Name brushed her hair, the three of them got to talking about identity and the ways in which appearance and social situations ground up against that. Warmth wanted– no, needed that recognition of fluidity that night.
+As Warmth and her on-again-off-again partner, Hold My Name, comforted her, four or five Warmths surrounding her while Hold My Name brushed her hair, the three of them got to talking about identity and the ways in which appearance and social situations ground up against that. Warmth wanted– no, needed that recognition of fluidity that night.
 
 Motes increasingly needed out of this strict adherence to form.
 
@@ -48,11 +48,11 @@ Motes increasingly needed out of this strict adherence to form.
 
 The inflection point came when she, the Motes who had been forked not three years prior, the Motes who was still a human who looked much like A Finger Pointing, her immediate down-tree, sat in a paint tray while painting a stage-wide sunset on a scrim.
 
-There she was, kneeling carefully on the stage and twisting around to see the red splotch ground into the seat of her sturdy work overalls, and laughing. She laughed as she recognized the mess she had made — one big butt-print on the matte black of the stage — and she laughed at the way the paint had very clearly started to seep into the denim of her overalls. She laughed as memories flooded into her mind, of red paint on corduroy, of Miss Willard's snippy admonition, of her mom's patient reassurances. She laughed and, rather than wave away the mess that she had made on her overalls, she lay down on her front and summoned up a smaller paintbrush instead of the roller she had been using, loaded it up with paint, and started filling in the awkward splotch of paint on the stage into the body of some critter, round and soft. She took a break from her sunset and instead painted a fat, cartoonish skunk all in red.
+There she was, kneeling carefully on the stage and twisting around to see the red splotch ground into the seat of her sturdy work overalls, and laughing. She laughed as she recognized the mess she had made — one big butt-print on the matte black of the stage — and she laughed at the way the paint had very clearly started to seep into the denim of her overalls. She laughed as memories flooded into her mind, of red paint on corduroy, of Miss Willard's snippy admonition, of her mom's patient reassurances. She laughed and, rather than wave away the mess that she had made on her overalls, she lay down on her front and summoned up a smaller paintbrush instead of the roller she had been using, loaded it up with paint, and started filling in the awkward splotch on the stage into the body of some critter, round and soft. She took a break from her sunset and instead painted a fat, cartoonish skunk all in red.
 
 By the time That It Might Give The World Orders, the play's director, found her, she had added an idealized field of grass and dandelions, had painted in a frolicking fennec fox in blue, and still lay on her front, the seat of her pants colored in red from the paint she had sat in.
 
-Rather than admonish her like Miss Willard of past, That It Might Give had stood in silence for a long minute, looking down at her cocladist laying down and painting with a sheepish grin on her face, and then laughed. She laughed, leaned down, and ruffled Motes's hair and then sat with her, doodling bumblebees on the stage's surface, floating up above skunk and fennec, above grass and dandelions, and sharing in memories.
+Rather than admonish her like Miss Willard of the past, That It Might Give had stood in silence for a long minute, looking down at her cocladist laying down on her belly and painting with a sheepish grin on her face, and then laughed. She laughed, leaned down, and ruffled Motes's hair and then sat with her, doodling bumblebees on the stage's surface, floating up above skunk and fennec, above grass and dandelions, and sharing in memories.
 
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@@ -66,7 +66,7 @@ They are two different ways of moving in the world, and yet they end in the same
 
 Motes fell into friendship as a kid. She fell into friendship with Alexei. She fell into friendship with Who Walks The Path. She fell into friendship with so many other kids she met at this playground or at that game sim. 
 
-Fell into and fell out of, yes? For kids fall out of friendship just as easily. They find a similarity and become the bestest of friends with each other and then that turns out to not be enough to maintain a friendship or it turns out that the other kid has another, bestester friend or it turns out that the other kid is actually kind of a b-word. And so Motes fell into friendship with Jonie who was a dog and then fell out of that friendship some few weeks later when Jonie who was a dog called Motes stinky one too many times and she was *not* stinky. She fell into friendship with Khadijah Bt. Faisal when she went through a rope skipping phase and then fell out of it when the phase ended and Khadijah cried and cried and cried and when Motes tried to rekindle the friendship the trust had already been broken. She fell out of relationships but never as many as she fell into and relationships lasted years or decades.
+Fell into and fell out of, yes? For kids fall out of friendship just as easily. They find a similarity and become the bestest of friends with each other and then that turns out to not be enough to maintain a friendship or it turns out that the other kid has another, bestester friend or it turns out that the other kid is actually kind of a b-word. And so Motes fell into friendship with Jonie who was a dog and then fell out of that friendship some few weeks later when Jonie who was a dog called Motes stinky one too many times and she was *not* stinky. She fell into friendship with Khadijah when she went through a rope skipping phase and then fell out of it when the phase ended and Khadijah cried and cried and cried and when Motes tried to rekindle the friendship the bond had already been broken. She fell out of relationships but never as many as she fell into and relationships lasted years or decades.
 
 She fell into and out of friendships and forgot, perhaps, how to form adult friendships, and so many people she met as Big Motes only passed through her life for a week or so.
 
@@ -86,7 +86,7 @@ She liked that.
 
 Slow Hours, Motes's big sister, had once had it said about her by Deny All Beginnings, town crier to her town scryer, "It seems so often to me that you have the criss-cross pattern of a schoolyard tool imprinted on your face, no doubt hurled at at you by a god." She explained this to Motes that there was some contemporary interpretation of the Greek god Apollo hurling a dodgeball at the innocent to bless them with the gift of prophecy.
 
-And she had indeed become the prophet of the clade, the one checkered with predictions and who bore the heady scent of omens. She was the Delphic oracle to so many other prognosticators. She would get this dreamy, distant smile on her face and then she would speak. She would say, "I will tell you two truths and one lie about the future" and then she would say unnerving things that would almost certainly come to pass. Yes, they make take years to do so, but she was uncanny in her accuracy.
+And she had indeed become the prophet of the clade, the one checkered with predictions and who bore the heady scent of omens. She was the Delphic oracle to so many other prognosticators. She would get this dreamy, distant smile on her face and then she would speak. She would say, "I will tell you two truths and one lie about the future" and then she would say unnerving things that would almost certainly come to pass. Yes, they might take years to do so, but she was uncanny in her accuracy.
 
 So Motes came to her, to the crowd of other crew, who always seemed to tolerate Slow Hours better than the cast, came to her and threw herself dramatically across her cocladist's lap, requesting some brushings to get the paint flecks out of her tail while she thought about how to say what she needed to say.
 
@@ -102,7 +102,7 @@ She nodded. "We danced for a bit in the pit and then got some drinks and talked
 
 Slow Hours nodded. "I sense a 'but', Speck."
 
-"Wellll..." Motes said, pushing herself back up to sitting. "I do not do love, but a lot of people do, including a lot of the people I wind up spending the night with in Big Motes mode. I am honest and up front, duh, and most understand that this is just for the fun of it. I am a healthy woman, right? I am two centuries old, but I am still thirty, yeah? I like sex as much as any two hundred year old woman in her thirties."
+"Wellll..." Motes said, pushing herself back up to sitting. "I do not do love, but a lot of people do, including a lot of the people I wind up spending the night with in Big Motes mode. I am honest and up front, duh, and most understand that this is just for the fun of it. I am a healthy woman, right? I am, like, a century and a half old, but I am still thirty, right? I like sex as much as any hundred and fifty year old woman in her thirties."
 
 She nodded, laughing.
 
@@ -120,7 +120,7 @@ She groaned and buried her face against her cocladist's shoulder. "I knooow. Any
 
 She shook her head. "That was part of what I wanted to talk to you about."
 
-Slow Hours asked her several questions. She asked about the person. She asked about the day before. She asked about the morning after. She asked about Beholden and Unbidden and the crowd around her. She asked about how drunk she had been, how high. She asked like there was some thread being tugged, whether by her fingers or by Motes's or Apollo himself. No one ever asked how this worked, not even Slow Hours — *especially* not Slow Hours — lest the whole thing come tumbling down.
+Slow Hours asked her several questions. She asked about the person. She asked about the day before. She asked about the morning after. She asked about Beholden and Unbidden and the crowd around her. She asked about how drunk she had been, how high. She asked like there was some thread being tugged, whether by her fingers or by Motes's or by Apollo himself. No one ever asked how this worked, not even Slow Hours — *especially* not Slow Hours — lest the whole thing come tumbling down.
 
 "Speck," she said, interrupting Motes at one point. "Here are two truths and a lie."
 
@@ -162,7 +162,7 @@ Motes should not, she is told, do many things, and yet she does them anyway. She
 
 She is told these things via hints and intimations. She is told these things through A Finger Pointing and Slow Hours and countless others.
 
-She is told gently. She is told to be careful. She is told out of a sense of protectiveness. She is told because, regardless of the implications of these warnings, the fifth stanza really does love her — they tell her and she believes — and she is told because even she can see many ways that there are plenty and sufficient reasons that someone looking young in a world with a lower bound on age would be viewed with disdain, and yet she may not see *all* of those ways.
+She is told gently. She is told to be careful. She is told out of a sense of protectiveness. She is told because, regardless of the implications of these warnings, the fifth stanza really does love her — they tell her and she believes them — and she is told because even she can see many ways that there are plenty and sufficient reasons that someone looking young in a world with a lower bound on age would be viewed with disdain, and yet she may not see *all* of those ways.
 
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@@ -178,15 +178,15 @@ But she played in that transgression. She used it to push and press against thos
 
 She played as a child — even if, at first, it was only within the confines of home, and then within the stanza's neighborhood, and then within the troupe, before she ever did so in public.
 
-She played in that familial identity, of A Finger Pointing as 'ma' and Beholden as 'Bee' and Slow Hours as Sis Hours — even if, at first, it was only within the confines of home; even if, at first, it engendered awkward and cautious feelings.
+She played in that familial identity, of A Finger Pointing as 'Ma' and Beholden as 'Bee' and Slow Hours as Sis Hours — even if, at first, it was only within the confines of home; even if, at first, it engendered awkward and cautious feelings.
 
-Life's but a walking shadow, a player poor that struts and frets upon the stage, yes? All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players, yes?
+Life is but a walking shadow, a player poor that struts and frets upon the stage, yes? All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players, yes?
 
 Motes played because life was a play.
 
 But even as she tested those boundaries and always respected them when they were set, she would ever negotiate a way forward such that she could live this life that she had set for herself.
 
-It was a bit, and she was committed to it. She was an actress, yes? She had a part to play, yes? The kid? The child? The daughter and sister, yes? It was method acting over the course of a lifetime. She committed to the bit and convinced herself to forget how to uncommit, and that, in itself was lovely.
+It was a bit, and she was committed to it. She was an actress, yes? She had a part to play, yes? The kid? The child? The daughter and sister, yes? It was method acting over the course of a lifetime. She committed to the bit and convinced herself as best she could to forget how to uncommit, and that, in itself was lovely.
 
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